Twenty years of stream restoration in Finland: little response by benthic macroinvertebrate communities

The primary focus of many in-stream restoration projects is to enhance habitat diversity for salmonid fishes, yet the lack of properly designed monitoring studies, particularly ones with pre-restoration data, limits any attempts to assess whether restoration has succeeded in improving salmonid habitat. Even less is known about the impacts of fisheries-related restoration on other, non-target biota. We examined how restoration aiming at the enhancement of juvenile brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) affects benthic macroinvertebrates, using two separate data sets: (1) a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design with three years before and three after restoration in differently restored and control reaches of six streams; and (2) a space-time substitution design including channelized, restored, and near-natural streams with an almost 20-year perspective on the recovery of invertebrate communities. In the BACI design, total macroinvertebrate density differed significantly from before to after restoration. Following restoration, densities decreased in all treatments, but less so in the controls than in restored sections. Taxonomic richness also decreased from before to after restoration, but this happened similarly in all treatments. In the long-term comparative study, macroinvertebrate species richness showed no difference between the channel types. Community composition differed significantly between the restored and natural streams, but not between restored and channelized streams. Overall, the in-stream restoration measures used increased stream habitat diversity but did not enhance benthic biodiversity. While many macroinvertebrates may be dispersal limited, our study sites should not have been too distant to reach within almost two decades. A key explanation for the weak responses by macroinvertebrate communities may have been historical. When Fennoscandian streams were channelized for log floating, the loss of habitat heterogeneity was only partial. Therefore, habitat may not have been limiting the macroinvertebrate communities to begin with. Stream restoration to support trout fisheries has strong public acceptance in Finland and will likely continue to increase in the near future. Therefore, more effort should be placed on assessing restoration success from a biodiversity perspective using multiple organism groups in both stream and riparian ecosystems.     

Uncertainty analysis of emission estimates in the RAINS integrated assessment model

Uncertainty is a critical issue for all models that attempt to quantify the necessary emission reductions that are required to meet environmental quality targets. This paper discusses a methodology specifically developed to analyse the uncertainties in the emission estimates with the regional air pollution information and simulation (RAINS) integrated assessment model, considering the uncertainties in the model parameters themselves. Overall, it was found that a typical range of uncertainties for modeled national emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ammonia in Europe lies between 10 and 30%. In general, the uncertainties are strongly dependent on the potential for error compensation. This compensation potential is larger (and uncertainties are smaller) if calculated emissions are composed of a larger number of equal-sized source categories, where the errors in input parameters are not correlated with each other. Thus, estimates of the national total emissions are generally more certain than estimates of sectoral emissions. A sensitivity analysis with respect to the uncertainty in input parameters showed that the actual uncertainties are critically influenced by the specific situation (pollutant, year, country). However, the emission factor is an important contributor to the uncertainty in estimates of historical emissions, while uncertainty in the activity data dominates the future estimates.     

Quantification of free and esterified long-chain fatty acids without extraction by high-performance liquid chromatography in anaerobic digestion sludge

Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management - During anaerobic digestion, the concentrations of long-chain fatty acids (LCFAs) need to be monitored to achieve good performance due to their...     

Spatial scale affects community concordance among fishes, benthic macroinvertebrates, and bryophytes in streams.

Owing to the lack of information about the distribution patterns of many taxonomic groups, biodiversity conservation strategies commonly rely on a surrogate taxa approach for identifying areas of maximum conservation potential. Macroinvertebrates or fish are the most likely candidates for such a role in many freshwater systems. The usefulness of the surrogate taxa depends largely on community concordance, i.e., the degree of similarity in community patterns among taxonomic groups across a set of sites. We examined the effect of the spatial scale of a. study on the strength of community concordance among macroinvertebrates, bryophytes, and fish by comparing the concordance between ordinations of these groups in 101 boreal stream sites. We specifically asked if communities spanning several drainages are more concordant than those originating from a single drainage system. Our results indicate that community concordance is affected by spatial extent, being variable and generally weak at the scale of individual drainages, but strong across multiple drainage systems and ecoregions. We attribute this finding to different taxonomic groups responding to similar environmental factors and sharing a similar latitudinal gradient of community structure when viewed across large spatial scales. We also identified a "gradient of concordance," with sites contributing disproportionately to community concordance being in relatively large streams with high microhabitat variability. Overall, our results suggest that the degree of community concordance among freshwater organism groups depends critically on the spatial extent of the study, and surrogate groups at the scale of single river systems should be used with caution.