Relative influence of flow regime, natural and anthropogenic environment on multidimensional stream fish diversity

The flow regime is considered a ‘master variable’ in riverine ecology because it directly influences stream geomorphology and biological communities. However, other environmental and anthropogenic factors have direct and synergistic effects with flow on fish diversity, complicating estimates of the flow regime's true importance. Moreover, most flow-ecology studies focus only on taxonomic diversity (i.e., species), without considering functional (trait-focused) or phylogenetic (evolution-focused) dimensions of diversity. In this study, we used linear regression with variation partitioning to parse out the independent and shared roles of the flow regime, physical environmental factors (e.g., soil characteristics) and the anthropogenic environment (e.g., developed land cover) for structuring multidimensional diversity of 365 stream fish communities in two biogeographic regions across South Carolina, USA. These variables explained between 8% and 18% of total variation of the local diversity. The flow regime contributed to diversity in all cases, but frequently covaried with physical and/or anthropogenic environmental variables. This covariation indicated that the independent role of flow would have been inflated if other environmental variables were not considered. The three dimensions of stream fish diversity were weakly correlated with one another and were associated with different environmental variables, indicating that each of them represents unique and complimentary facets of fish diversity. Accordingly, only considering the independent effects of instream flow on fish diversity may miss meaningful interactions between the flow regime and the other components of the environment that influence biodiversity patterns, leading to over simplified flow–ecology relationships.