Conservation Across Aquatic-Terrestrial Boundaries: Linking Continental-Scale Water Quality to Emergent Aquatic Insects and Declining Aerial Insectivorous Birds

Larval aquatic insects are used to assess water quality, but less attention is paid to their adult, terrestrial life stage, which is an important food resource for declining aerial insectivorous birds. We used open-access water-quality, aquatic-invertebrate, and bird-survey data to study how impaired water quality can emanate from streams and lakes through changes in aquatic insect communities across the contiguous United States. Emergent insect relative abundance was highest across the West, in northern New England, and the Carolinas in streams, and highest near the Great Lakes, parts of the Southwest, and northern New England for lakes. Emergent insects declined with sedimentation, roads, and elevated ammonium concentrations in streams, but not lakes. The odds that a given taxon would be non-emergent increased by up to 2.0× as a function of pollution tolerance, underscoring the sensitivity of emergent aquatic insects to water-quality impairment. However, relationships between bird populations and emergent insects were generally weak for both streams and lakes. For streams, we observed the strongest positive relationships for a mixture of upland and riparian aerial insectivorous birds such as Western Wood-Pewee, Olive-sided Flycatcher, and Acadian Flycatcher and the strongest negative association for Purple Martin. Different avian insectivores responded to emergent insect abundances in lakes (e.g., Barn Swallow, Chimney Swift, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Common Nighthawk). In both streams and lakes, we observed stronger, but opposing, relationships between several aerial insectivores and the relative abundance of sensitive insect orders (E)phemeroptera, (P)lecoptera, and (T)richoptera (positive), and pollution tolerant individuals (negative). Overall, our findings indicate that emergent insects are negatively correlated with pollution tolerance, suggesting a large-scale loss of this nutritional subsidy to terrestrial environments from impaired aquatic ecosystems. While some bird populations tracked scarcities of emergent aquatic insects, especially EPT taxa, responses varied among species, suggesting that unique habitat and foraging behaviors likely complicated these relationships. Strengthening spatial and temporal concordance between emergent-insect and bird-survey data will improve our ability to interpret species-level responses over time. Thus, our analysis highlights the need for developing conservation and biomonitoring strategies that consider the cross-ecosystem effects of water quality declines for threatened insectivorous avifauna and other terrestrial wildlife.

Interactions among Land, Water, and Vegetation in Shoreline Arthropod Communities

We investigated the distribution and abundance of terrestrial spiders as a function of their distance from a body of water and the structure of vegetation that would provide suitable habitat. We hypothesized that spiders would prefer to be located near the water to catch abundant aquatic emergent insects. In Montana along the Upper Missouri River, and in Missouri at various locations around Table Rock Lake, transect lines were run from the water’s edge to 25 meters inland. At five-meter intervals, in one square meter plots, the number of spiders, number of prey and type, and vegetation type and structure were recorded. In both Montana and Missouri, spider distribution was more strongly associated with available vegetation structure than with distance from shore. This suggests that, although prey availability may be important for predator distribution, suitable habitat is as strong or stronger a determinant for web building spiders.