An increased understanding of prairie-pothole-wetland macroinvertebrate dynamics is crucial to better inform conservation strategies related to waterfowl production, biodiversity enhancement, and wetland function/health maintenance. Wetlands in general are highly variable in space and time, and wetland macroinvertebrates are adapted to this great variability. Wetland ecosystems are also influenced by their placement along continua describing atmospheric and groundwater inputs and losses, i.e., the Wetland Continuum. In this effort we are 1) quantitatively assessing hypothesized direct and indirect macroinvertebrate community responses to wetland positioning along axes of the Wetland Continuum, 2) assessing hypothesized direct and indirect macroinvertebrate trophic functional group responses to wetland positioning along axes of the Wetland Continuum, 3) evaluating the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic assembly processes in structuring aquatic macroinvertebrate communities, and 4) integrating aquatic-macroinvertebrate population dynamic relationships derived from empirical analyses and theoretical processes into a dynamic systems model.
