Ross Vander Vorste

University of Wisconsin - La Crosse | UWLAX · Department of Biology

In naturally disturbed systems, harsh environmental conditions act as filters on the regional species pool, restricting the number of taxa able to form a local community to those with traits promoting resistance or resilience. Thus, communities in highly disturbed ecosystems may be less sensitive to a given disturbance than those in less disturbed...

1. In river systems, aquatic invertebrate communities are surprisingly persistent over time and generally recover quickly from disturbances. Drift has long been viewed as the primary process promoting this resilience, and it plays a important role in predictive models of community composition and concepts in lotic ecology. More recently, other proc...

The saturated interstices below and adjacent to the riverbed (i.e., the hyporheic zone) can be a refuge for biota during low flows, flow cessation and river drying. Prior to complete drying, organisms are constrained by abiotic and biotic factors (e.g., water temperature, competition) and may respond through vertical migration into the hyporheic zo...

River drying has drastic immediate effects on benthic invertebrates, but their high resilience reduces long-term effects on biodiversity and ecosystem functions (e.g. leaf litter decomposition). The hyporheic zone (saturated sediments below the riverbed) can be a refuge for invertebrates in dry rivers and a primary source of colonists supporting po...

• Natural levels of salinity in aquatic ecosystems drive biodiversity patterns across broad spatial scales; however, less is known about changes in biotic communities and the ecosystem functions they support along anthropogenic salinisation gradients. Resource extraction often causes salinisation of freshwater ecosystems which may extirpate salinit...

The lack of data from non-perennial rivers, which regularly cease to flow and dry up, poses a significant challenge in understanding river biodiversity. These dynamic ecosystems, accounting for over half of the global river network, remain understudied. To address this gap, we conducted a coordinated experiment and a metabarcoding approach on envir...

Climate change is altering the water cycle globally, increasing the frequency and magnitude of floods and droughts. An outstanding question is whether biodiversity responses to hydrological disturbance depend on background climatic context – and if so, which contexts increase vulnerability to disturbance. Answering this question requires comparison...

In freshwater environments, the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up effects on invertebrate communities in relation to productivity are largely ecosystem dependent. Artificial wetlands are increasingly developed to compensate for the loss of natural wetlands; however, their trophic processes remain poorly studied. The present study aim...

Recent droughts raise global concern over potential biodiversity loss and mitigating impacts to vulnerable species has become a management priority. However, drought impacts on populations are difficult to predict, in part, because habitat refuges can buffer organisms from harsh environmental conditions. In a global change context, more extreme dro...

Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) may represent over half the global stream network, but their contribution to respiration and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is largely undetermined. In particular, little is known about the variability and drivers of respiration in IRES sediments upon rewetting, which could result in large pulses of...

Climate change and human pressures are changing the global distribution and extent of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES), which comprise half of the global river network area. IRES are characterized by periods of flow cessation, during which channel substrates accumulate and undergo physico‐chemical changes (preconditioning), and peri...

Perennial rivers and streams make a disproportionate contribution to global carbon (C) cycling. However, the contribution of intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES),which sometimes cease to flow and can dry completely, is largely ignored although theymay represent over half the global river network. Substantial amounts of terrestrialplant...

In the version of this Article originally published, the affiliation for M. I. Arce was incorrect; it should have been: ⁵Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany. This has now been corrected in the online versions of the Article.

Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) support diverse and sometimes distinctive aquatic invertebrate communities. Although flow intermittence has been linked to reduced taxa richness, the highly variable environmental conditions that characterize IRES can enhance both taxonomic and functional diversity, with different invertebrates chara...

Understanding drivers of biodiversity is a long-standing goal of basic and applied ecological research. In riverine systems, there remains a critical need to identify these drivers as efforts to manage and protect rivers grow increasingly desperate in the face of global change. We explored one commonly cited potential driver of riverine biodiversit...

More freshwater ecosystems are drying in response to global change thereby posing serious threat to freshwater biota and functions. The production of desiccation-resistant forms is an important adaptation that helps maintain biodiversity in temporary freshwa-ters by buffering communities from drying, but its potential to mitigate the negative effec...

More freshwater ecosystems are drying in response to global change thereby posing serious threat to freshwater biota and functions. The production of desiccation-resistant forms is an important adaptation that helps maintain biodiversity in temporary freshwa-ters by buffering communities from drying, but its potential to mitigate the negative effec...

Intermittent rivers and ephemeral streams (IRES) are temporally dynamic ecosystems that can support a diverse and distinctive aquatic invertebrate fauna – Resistance and resilience mechanisms allow species and communities to persist in IRES during dry phases and to recolonize quickly once flow returns – Human influences including climate change and...

Understanding community response to disturbance is essential to identifying processes that determine their assembly and to predicting the future effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Drying (complete loss of surface water) is a natural disturbance affecting 50% of rivers worldwide and is occurring more in perennial rive...

Understanding how communities respond to disturbance is essential to identifying processes that determine their assembly and to predicting the future effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Drying (i.e. complete loss of surface water) is a natural disturbance affecting 50% of rivers worldwide and is increasingly occurring...

Intermittent rivers are naturally dynamic ecosystems in which flow cessation and riverbed drying cause temporal fluctuations in aquatic biodiversity. We analysed datasets from intermittent rivers in different climate zones across the world to examine responses of aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages to drying, in relation to both taxonomic composi...

Intermittent streams comprise 90% of stream and river miles in South Dakota. Hydroperiod (duration of flow) was examined in 60 intermittent headwater streams in the Northern Glaciated Plains ecoregion of eastern South Dakota. HOBO (Onset Inc.) temperature loggers were used to track daily temperature amplitudes and allowed detection of drying dates....

Headwater streams are linked tightly with terrestrial systems and contribute directly to downstream channel habitat and water quality. They comprise the majority of stream miles in South Dakota but have received little attention. The objective of this effort was to assess differences in physical habitat between intermittent streams of the Prairie C...

Intermittent streams comprise about 90% of stream and river miles, and the Northern Glaciated Plains (NGP) ecoregion (46) encompasses about 33% of land area in South Dakota. Currently, little is known about the macroinver-tebrate communities inhabiting intermittent streams in this region. This information is crucial if deviations from reference (un...

Biological monitoring is a necessary tool used for assessing the quality of fresh water ecosystems. Accurate biological assessments allow for determining the exposure of aquatic communities to different classes of stressors (e.g., domestic waste, agricultural runoff and sedimentation, pesticides, habitat alteration). Biomonitoring can guide manager...