Influence of Anthropic Impacts on the Functional Structure of Aquatic Invertebrates in Subtropical Wetlands

Changes in land cover are the main threats to integrity and biodiversity of wetlands. Here, we evaluated the effects of agriculture and urbanization on the functional traits (FT) of aquatic invertebrate. We evaluated 30 wetlands distributed among agricultural, urban and natural landscapes on the south of Brazil. We selected eight FT that encompassed aspects of life history, morphology and behavioral strategies to functionally characterize invertebrate fauna and 10 environmental variables of wetlands. We collected 3868 organisms distributed among 138 taxa (Crustacea, Mollusca, Hexapoda. The RLQ analysis (environmental, R; species-abundances, L; species-traits, Q) showed that there was a relationship between environmental conditions and the functional composition of the invertebrates. The FT that were more sensitive to environmental changes were scrapers feeding habit, reproduction mode, resistance form, adult aquatic stage, flat body shape, and dispersal mode. Our results suggest that land use acted as environmental filters, as they promote the selection and convergence of specific characteristics that give organisms more resilience and/or resistance to cope with the effects of anthropogenic disturbances. Also this results showed that (i) human disturbance can influence directly on the dynamic of the wetlands ecosystems functioning and (ii) the efficiency of the use FT in the environmental monitoring.