Just add water: rapid assembly of new communities in previously dry riverbeds, and limited long-distance effects on existing communities.

Barriers preventing species from dispersing to a location can have a major influence on how communities assemble. Dispersal success may also depend on whether dispersers have to colonise an established community or a largely depauperate location. In freshwater systems, dams and weirs have fragmented rivers, potentially limiting dispersal of biota along rivers. Decommissioning aqueducts on two weirs, each within a tributary of different regulated rivers, delivered flow to previously dry riverbeds and additional flows to the main stem, regulated rivers further downstream. This provided an opportunity to test how removal of dispersal constraints affected community assembly in new habitats and whether changed dispersal can alter existing communities. The results were very similar for the two systems. Even with dispersal constrained via reduced drift rates, the new communities in the newly formed habitat in tributaries rapidly resembled unimpacted reference communities that were the source of colonists. For established communities (regulated rivers), greater flow increased the densities of filter feeders but this was due to greater areas of fast-flowing habitat (a change in environmental constraints) rather than higher dispersal rates. Our study illustrates that communities can quickly re-assemble when natural channels that have been dry for decades are re-wetted by flows that deliver dispersers from intact locations upstream. Nevertheless, boosting flows and concomitant densities of dispersers had no strong effects on existing communities. Instead, increased discharges effected a reduction in environmental constraints, which altered trophic structure. Thus, increases in discharge and dispersal produced different outcomes in new versus established communities.

Adaptive Management of Return Flows: Lessons from a Case Study in Environmental Water Delivery to a Floodplain River.

For many floodplain rivers, reinstating wetland connectivity is necessary for ecosystems to recover from decades of regulation. Environmental return flows (the managed delivery of wetland water to an adjacent river) can be used strategically to facilitate natural ecosystem connectivity, enabling the transfer of nutrients, energy, and biota from wetland habitats to the river. Using an informal adaptive management framework, we delivered return flows from a forested wetland complex into a large lowland river in south-eastern Australia. We hypothesized that return flows would (a) increase river nutrient concentrations; (b) reduce wetland nutrient concentrations; (c) increase rates of ecosystem metabolism through the addition of potentially limiting nutrients, causing related increases in the concentration of water column chlorophyll-a; and (d) increase the density and species richness of microinvertebrates in riverine benthic habitats. Our monitoring results demonstrated a small increase in the concentrations of several key nutrients but no evidence for significant ecological responses was found. Although return flows can be delivered from forested floodplain areas without risking hypoxic blackwater events, returning nutrient and carbon-rich water to increase riverine productivity is limited by the achievable scale of return flows. Nevertheless, using return flows to flush carbon from floodplains may be a useful management tool to reduce carbon loads, preparing floodplains for subsequent releases (e.g., mitigating the risk of hypoxic blackwater events). In this example, adaptive management benefited from a semi-formal collaboration between science and management that allowed for prompt decision-making.