Aquatic insects and their environmental predictors: a scientometric study focused on environmental monitoring in...

Since early studies about aquatic ecology, it has been found that changes in environmental conditions alter aquatic insect communities. Based on this, the combined study of environmental conditions and aquatic insect communities has become an important tool to monitor and manage freshwater systems. However, there is no consensus about which environmental predictors and facets of diversity are more useful for environmental monitoring. The objective of this work was to conduct a scientometric analysis to identify the main environmental predictors and biological groups used to monitor and manage lotic freshwater systems. We conducted a scientometric study on the Web of Science platform using the following words: stream, river, aquatic insect, Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera, Odonata, Heteroptera, Chironomidae, bioindicator, environmental change, anthropic, and land use. Although most of the environmental predictors employed are local, intrinsic of freshwater systems using local environmental and associated landscape variables is a better strategy to predict aquatic insect communities. The facets of diversity most used are composition and richness of species and genera, which are not efficient at measuring the loss of ecosystem services and extinction of phylogenetic lineages. Although very important, these functional and phylogenetic facets are poorly explored for this purpose. Even though tropical regions are the most diverse globally and are experiencing major losses of native vegetation, these ecosystems are the least studied, a knowledge gap that needs addressing to better understand the effect of anthropogenic activities on the diversity of aquatic insects.