ArticleNature communications2019
Water quality improvements offset the climatic debt for stream macroinvertebrates over twenty years.
Article in Nature communications, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spawning in a threatened freshwater mussel shifts to earlier dates as a result of increasing summer mortality.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Recovery and Degradation Drive Changes in the Dispersal Capacity of Stream Macroinvertebrate Communities.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Time series of freshwater macroinvertebrate abundances and site characteristics of European streams and rivers.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Warming underpins community turnover in temperate freshwater and terrestrial communities.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Abundance trends for river macroinvertebrates vary across taxa, trophic group and river typology.Global change biology · 2023Article
- Climate and land-use changes interact to drive long-term reorganization of riverine fish communities globally.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Complex long-term biodiversity change among invertebrates, bryophytes and lichens.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many species are accumulating climatic debt as they fail to keep pace with increasing global temperatures. In theory, concomitant decreases in other stressors (e.g. pollution, fragmentation) could offset some warming effects, paying climatic debt with accrued environmental credit. This process may be occurring in many western European rivers. We fit a Markov chain model to ~20,000 macroinvertebrate samples from England and Wales, and demonstrate that despite large temperature increases 1991-2011, macroinvertebrate communities remained close to their predicted equilibrium with environmental conditions. Using a novel analysis of multiple stressors, an accumulated climatic debt of 0.64 (±0.13 standard error) °C of warming was paid by a water-quality credit equivalent to 0.89 (±0.04)°C of cooling. Although there is finite scope for mitigating additional climate warming in this way, water quality improvements appear to have offset recent temperature increases, and the concept of environmental credit may be a useful tool for communicating climate offsetting.
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Registered trials
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