School of Geography - Theses
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ItemColonisation patterns of macroinvertebrates following restoration of an agricultural stream( 2014)Today, the overwhelming degree of degradation in rivers and streams around the world has resulted in the area of environmental restoration becoming more vital than ever. However projects which aim at rehabilitating ecosystems have been identified as having mixed success. The reasons for this may be due to a lack of ecological theory underpinning the design of these projects and with this a lack of understanding regarding colonisation patterns of macroinvertebrates after restoration. Therefore this study aims to test for the colonisation patterns of fugitive species after a restoration experiment of Hughes creek in central Victoria, Australia. Leaf packs were constructed by filling an onion bag with detritus material and placed at three of the sites restored in a previous restoration experiment and three of the non-manipulated control sites with half the bags placed on the stream bed and the other half at the stream surface. Three stream bed and three stream surface leaf packs were collected on intervals of one day, two days, one week and three weeks and taken to the laboratory for macroinvertebrate identification. Abundances for twelve focal macroinvertebrate species were counted for the three variables of; sample days, in stream location and site (experiment or control). Data was run through a split plot analysis of variance which identified that the species Cheumatopsyche sp. small could be a possible fugitive species, displaying a possible trend between all three variables. Additionally Offadens sp. and Austrosimulium furiosum were identified as possible fugitive species based on their high abundance on the first day of sampling and then numbers decreasing with time. Additionally it was identified that some species may become more dispersive and had greater presence in the drift when resource availability at sites was low. Therefore this study highlights the importance of understanding dispersal patterns to aid in successful restoration of degraded freshwater environments.