The increasing drying of rivers due to climate change and human water extraction threatens aquatic biodiversity, especially macroinvertebrates, which are key to lotic ecosystems. This thesis project aims to understand how the interaction between macroinvertebrate life-history traits (e.g., fecundity, mortality, drought resistance) and dispersal modes (e.g., swimming, drift, flight) with intermittent river regimes structures the composition, diversity, and spatio-temporal dynamics of their metacommunities.
The project will use two complementary approaches. The first involves analyzing spatiotemporal biodiversity variations to determine the influence of physical environmental
constraints on both taxonomic and functional trait diversity. The second approach will enrich a theoretical metacommunity model by explicitly integrating biological traits and their trade-offs. The goal is to explain species coexistence and community structuring at different scales by identifying the trait combinations that promote persistence in fluctuating hydrological conditions