ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Ecol. Evol.
Sec. Biogeography and Macroecology
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fevo.2025.1640255
High-connectivity species drive macroinvertebrate community stability in river ecosystems
Provisionally accepted
- China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, China
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Identifying keystone species and investigating their ecological regulatory role will help to prioritize important species and gain a better understanding of community stability mechanisms. In this study, macroinvertebrates were sampled from Chishui River (CSH, an undammed river) and Heishui River (HSH, a dammed river) in April 2018, 2019, and 2020. Macroinvertebrate networks were constructed to identify keystone species and reveal their ecological regulatory role on community stability. The results showed that the loss of high-connectivity species had a greater impact on macroinvertebrate community stability than the loss of high-biomass and high-density species, which indicated that high-connectivity species with low abundance were keystone species. Moreover, these were primarily composed of less abundant species. The functional feeding traits of keystone species were dominated by predators in the undammed river and prey (i.e., collector-gatherers) in the dammed river, which suggested that the construction of dams transformed the functional feeding groups of keystone species. In addition, after the loss of keystone species, the decline rates of the half of the robustness (R50), survival area (SA), and network connectivity robustness (CR) in the dam-constructed reaches were higher than those in other reaches. This result demonstrated that the construction of dams may reduce the resistance of macroinvertebrate communities to keystone species loss. This study provides an important scientific basis for conserving aquatic life and maintaining the structural and functional stability of river ecosystems.
Keywords: keystone species, high-connectivity species, macroinvertebrates, Community stability, River ecosystem
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 09 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Zhang, Peng and QU. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Min Zhang, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, China
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