Threshold responses of riverine fish communities to land use conversion across regions of the world

Abstract

The growing human enterprise has sparked greater interest in identifying ecological thresholds in land use conversion beyond which populations or communities demonstrate abrupt nonlinear or substantive change in species composition. Such knowledge remains fundamental to understanding ecosystem resilience to environmental degradation and informing land use planning into the future. Confronting this challenge has been largely limited to inferring thresholds in univariate metrics of species richness and indices of biotic integrity and has largely ignored how land use legacies of the past may shape community responses of today. By leveraging data for 13,069 riverine sites from temperate, subtropical, and boreal climate zones on four continents, we characterize patterns of community change along diverse gradients of urbanization and agricultural land use, and identity threshold values beyond which significant alterations in species composition exists. Our results demonstrate the apparent universality by which freshwater fish communities are sensitive to even low levels of watershed urbanization (range of threshold values: 1%–12%), but consistently higher (and more variable) levels of agricultural development (2%–37%). We demonstrated that fish community compositional thresholds occurred, in general, at lower levels of watershed urbanization and agriculture when compared to threshold responses in species richness. This supports the notion that aggregated taxon‐specific responses may better reflect the complexity of assemblage responses to land use development. We further revealed that the ghost of land use past plays an important role in moderating how current‐day fish communities respond to land use intensification. Subbasins of the United States experiencing greater rates of past land use change demonstrated higher current‐day thresholds. Threshold responses of community composition, such as those identified in our study, illustrate the need for globally coordinated efforts to prioritize country‐specific management and policy initiatives that ensure that freshwater fish diversity is not inevitably lost in the future.