98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

OOS 20

Community-structuring Processes in Fragmented Freshwater Habitats: A Synthesis Across Scales and Systems

Climate change, habitat alteration, and water withdrawals are increasing fragmentation of freshwater habitats worldwide, and these drivers have motivated renewed interest in community dynamics in patchy aquatic systems. Discontinuities in habitat can occur spatially and/or temporally at multiple scales (e.g., centimeters to kilometers or hours to decades), and can occur naturally or due to anthropogenic intervention. Aquatic habitat fragmentation can affect a wide range of processes including community assembly, dispersal, species interactions, and food web connectance. Research manipulating spatial/temporal connectivity at micro-scales may shed light on fragmentation patterns observed at macro-scales and vice versa; however the diversity of studies and systems has made synthesis across research groups challenging. This session will bring together researchers from disparate freshwater systems in an effort to describe relationships between aquatic habitat patchiness and community processes at multiple scales and explore the mechanisms behind these relationships. We will synthesize patterns across three areas of research: 1) small-scale experimental manipulations of the spatial and temporal isolation of aquatic communities, 2) theoretical work using empirical data to model community processes in aquatic metacommunities, and 3) large-scale observational studies on communities in fragmented lotic and lentic habitats and their conservation implications. This synthesis will allow us to build a conceptual framework of community responses to fragmentation that will inform future research. As habitat fragmentation is a ubiquitous phenomenon, our session will attract laboratory ecologists, theoreticians, field biologists and conservationists, from both terrestrial and aquatic systems. This diversity will strengthen our capacity to bridge across research groups and ensure that our discussions are relevant to real-world conservation programs. Our format will encourage the natural progression of ideas from small-scale experiments to large-scale observations. First we will introduce the overall objective of synthesis across systems and scales and emphasize the applied context of this synthesis. Then, empiricists will demonstrate the utility of small-scale manipulations to examine connectivity, dispersal and abiotic factors as drivers of community assembly. Presentations of theoretical work will serve as a transition from manipulative to observational studies and provide a framework with which experimental data can be applied to address broad-scale questions. The session will conclude with presentations on fragmentation at the landscape level and how experimental patterns may inform conservation actions. We will encourage continued interactions in a social hour following the session.