Effectiveness of landscape indicators for explaining the variability of benthic macro-invertebrates in urban streams

Landscape indicators - measures of land use and land cover - are widely used as proxies for monitoring urban stream conditions, particularly for benthic invertebrates which are often negatively impacted by watershed urbanization. However, multi-scale and nonlinear relationships between benthic macroinvertebrates and landscape configuration derived from fine spatial resolution land cover are not well explored. Here, we developed a series of landscape indicators and assessed their effectiveness in explaining the variability of benthic macroinvertebrate communities in 63 streams across the Greater Vancouver Region in British Columbia, Canada. We asked: 1) How effective are multi-scale landscape indicators in explaining the variability of instream benthic macroinvertebrates? 2) Does the explanatory power of landscape indicators vary at different spatial scales? 3) Do different urban forest classification schemes and their spatial configurations impact the explanatory power of landscape indicators? We developed high spatial resolution (5-m) landscape indicators and evaluated their utility in statistical models explaining taxa richness, instream benthic indices of biological integrity (B-IBI), % Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT), and % Oligochaetes. For all benthic responses, landscape indicators measured at the watershed scale explained 5-25% more variation than riparian-based indicators. Combining indicators mapped at multiple scales further improved the explanatory power of landscape indicators for % EPT and % Oligochaetes, ultimately explaining over 70% of the variability of benthic macro-invertebrates in streams. Distinguishing deciduous and coniferous forest types improved the explanatory power of landscape indicators in a riparian model for B-IBI by 10%. When considering the spatial arrangement of land cover, patch density of forests in the surrounding watersheds of stream explained as much as 47% of the variability in % Oligochaetes. Our results highlight the importance of investigating nonlinear relationships between benthic macroinvertebrates and landscape configuration. This monitoring approach is transferable across cities interested in maintaining the ecological health of urban streams while supporting urban expansion and growth.