The research, conducted by Bethany Blakey of Utah State University and Natalie Bursztyn of James Madison University, examined citizen science data collected by the Watershed Education Network, a Missoula-based nonprofit whose Stream Team program has monitored local creeks for over two decades. Hundreds of volunteers contributed more than 4,000 hours of fieldwork between 2017 and 2024, measuring streambed sediments and tallying aquatic macroinvertebrates at ten sites—two upstream of the former dam as reference locations and eight downstream as impact sites. The dam, built in 1901, stood 18 meters wide and 3 meters tall, blocking 95 percent of the 210-square-kilometer watershed. It once supplied Missoula’s drinking water, but by the time of its removal it had been slated for demolition over safety and conservation concerns, with the project costing 1.1 million dollars and requiring the reconstruction of more than 300 meters of channel.

The scientific logic of the study rests on a well-established framework known as before-after-control-impact, or BACI. The idea is elegant: if a disturbance causes a real change, the difference between control sites and impacted sites should shift after the event. Upstream reaches, unaffected by the dam removal, serve as the control; downstream reaches are the impact zone. The researchers compared grain size distributions from Wolman pebble counts—a technique in which at least 100 stones are measured along their intermediate axis across the channel—and a macroinvertebrate biotic index adapted from the Hilsenhoff Biotic Index, which scores stream health based on the pollution tolerance of the insects living there. Because the number of observations was small, particularly at the upstream reference sites, the team relied on descriptive statistics rather than formal hypothesis tests, calculating the magnitude of change alongside its standard error.

The results were strikingly uneventful. Before the removal, median grain sizes upstream averaged 105.9 millimeters, while downstream sites averaged 100.1 millimeters—essentially indistinguishable given natural variability. After the removal, the upstream mean was 92.9 millimeters and the downstream mean 93.3 millimeters, still nearly identical. Every BACI value for every grain size percentile fell below its own standard error, meaning no detectable difference could be attributed to the dam coming down. The macroinvertebrate data told the same story. Biotic index values hovered within the good water quality range both before and after removal, upstream and downstream alike, with an overall post-removal difference of minus 0.13, well within the margin of error. For a stream that had been dammed since 1901, the absence of ecological upheaval demanded an explanation.

The authors point to two factors. First, the dam’s sluice gates had been permanently opened in 2012, eight years before the full removal, allowing water, fish, and sediment to pass freely during low to moderate flows. In effect, the creek had already undergone a staged removal—a strategy known from previous research to dramatically reduce erosion and sediment pulses compared with instantaneous breaching. By the time the concrete came out, the river had largely adjusted to a free-flowing condition. Second, no major flood occurred during the study period. Dam removal science describes a two-phase response: an initial rapid flush of reservoir sediment, followed by a slower, event-driven phase in which further erosion requires high flows. The first phase may have played out during the sluice gate opening, and without significant floods afterward, the second phase never really began. Peak flows in the two years after removal, around 21 to 25 cubic meters per second, were lower than the roughly 29 to 32 cubic meters per second peaks recorded before removal.

That null result is scientifically valuable in itself. Most dam removal studies capture only short-term post-removal impacts, and many collect no pre-removal data at all. Research on small historic dams has concentrated heavily on the eastern United States, even though the majority of the estimated 2.5 million dams in the country are under 1.83 meters tall and removals of these small structures are far more common than headline-grabbing demolitions of large dams. Montana alone has hundreds of small dams. The Rattlesnake Creek findings suggest that when a small dam has been effectively decommissioned through a staged opening, its physical removal may cause minimal detectable harm—or benefit—to sediment transport and aquatic life on a timescale of years. That insight matters directly for the nine remaining wilderness dams upstream in the Rattlesnake watershed, built between 1911 and 1923, whose potential removal is now under discussion.

Just as significant is what the study says about the volunteers who gathered the data. Skepticism about citizen science data quality has long shadowed the field, with some researchers finding volunteer datasets more variable than professional ones and others arguing that direct comparisons are inherently unfair. Yet the pebble count and macroinvertebrate datasets proved complete and analytically viable across all eight years. The authors attribute this success to field verification of data, well-designed paper datasheets, and the relative simplicity of the collection protocols—volunteers worked in teams, cross-checked tallies, and followed procedures rehearsed at the start of every outing. One volunteer described the experience as fulfilling childhood dreams of looking at bugs and counting rocks, adding that the work would matter for something. Another reflected that the program revealed science is not all organic chemistry; it can be fun things in the stream.

The study is equally candid about failure. The cross-section profiles, which would have revealed changes in channel shape and depth, proved unusable because of systematic data gaps. Before 2021, volunteers recorded numeric intervals without noting the measurement increments across the stream, and datasheets frequently failed to identify which of two required cross-sections was upstream and which was downstream. Without in-situ verification before leaving the field, the errors went unnoticed until analysis. From these shortcomings, the authors distilled four best practices: ensure every required measurement has a designated place on the datasheet and verify completeness before leaving the site; design digital datasheets that make data entry unambiguous; keep each data type in a single column or row; and create an easily accessible summary page that analysis software can read directly. The Watershed Education Network is now developing a tablet app with required entry fields to address exactly these vulnerabilities.

Beyond the data, the project illustrates the quieter power of community science. Stream Team outings became social events in a heavily recreated corridor, where hikers stopped to ask what bugs the volunteers had found and were invited to join the next outing. Participation in such programs has been shown to improve understanding of the scientific process and give voice to people otherwise excluded from environmental decisions. The study’s authors emphasize that citizen science can achieve spatial and temporal coverage that would be prohibitively expensive for professional researchers alone, provided that meticulous data management underpins the enthusiasm. As dam removals accelerate across Europe and North America, the Rattlesnake Creek experiment offers a dual lesson: staged decommissioning can defuse the ecological drama of removing a small dam, and a committed community of volunteers, given good protocols and honest accounting of their mistakes, can document the outcome with rigor that would make any professional monitoring team take notice.

Subject of Research: Citizen science monitoring of stream sediment and macroinvertebrate responses to a small dam removal on Rattlesnake Creek, Montana

Article Title: Citizen science as a long-term environmental baseline: assessing impacts of a small dam removal in Montana, USA

Article References: Blakey, B., & Bursztyn, N. (2026). Citizen science as a long-term environmental baseline: assessing impacts of a small dam removal in Montana, USA. Geoscience Communication, 9(3), 401-413. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-401-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-401-2026

Keywords: citizen science, dam removal, Rattlesnake Creek, Montana, stream ecology, macroinvertebrates, pebble counts, sediment transport, BACI design, river restoration, Watershed Education Network, long-term monitoring

The scale of the monitoring program is what gives the finding its weight. Between October 2020 and August 2024, the team sampled 19 sites along the Paraopeba River and its tributaries every two months, completing 23 separate sampling campaigns. At each site they focused on bottom-dwelling invertebrates, the insect larvae, worms and snails that live in and on the river bed. In total they identified more than 532,000 individual animals belonging to 304 distinct taxonomic groups. These organisms are among the most widely used indicators of river health anywhere in the world, and for good reason: they are relatively sedentary, so they cannot escape deteriorating conditions, and they respond quickly and measurably to changes in water quality, sediment composition and flow regime. If a river is under stress, the invertebrate community records that stress in place, over time.

Most river assessments count species and compare affected sites with unaffected ones. This study took a different analytical route. Instead of asking how many species lived at each site, the researchers measured how much each community changed between campaigns, and then separated that change into two components: the species that disappeared and the species that arrived. This distinction matters because a community can hold a constant number of species while its composition churns underneath, a phenomenon ecologists call high turnover. A river that keeps losing different species and gaining different replacements, campaign after campaign, is not converging on stability even if a simple species count suggests otherwise.

What the data revealed surprised even the researchers. “We expected the affected reaches to slowly converge on a stable community after this much time,” says lead author Diego Castro of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “What we found instead is a river that keeps being reshuffled. Species disappear and others arrive, campaign after campaign, and that has not slowed down.” Four years into the monitoring period, the rate of compositional change showed no clear deceleration, in reaches that received tailings and in those that did not.

That last point is critical. Strong turnover was recorded at every site, whether or not it had been directly hit by the 2019 waste pulse. “Communities turned over strongly at every site whether they were affected or not,” Castro says. “This points to a basin under chronic pressure from untreated sewage, agriculture, sand dredging and older mining on top of the tailings.” In other words, the Paraopeba was never a pristine river interrupted by a single catastrophe. It is a working, heavily used basin that has absorbed decades of cumulative stress, and the dam collapse was layered on top of an already compromised system. Disentangling the signal of the disaster from the noise of everyday degradation is one of the hardest problems in impact assessment, and this study shows why a single before-and-after comparison can be misleading.

The tailings themselves continue to play an active role in keeping the river unsettled. In the reaches that received the mining waste, high flows during the rainy season stir the fine sediment up from the river bed again and again. Each flood pulse effectively resets the biological community before it has time to reorganize and stabilize. The waste, in this sense, is not a static legacy buried in the channel; it is a recurring disturbance that returns with every wet season, physically reworking the substrate that bottom-dwelling invertebrates depend on for shelter, feeding and reproduction. A community that is periodically scoured cannot accumulate the slower-growing, more specialized species that mark a mature river ecosystem.

The tributaries told a strikingly different story. While the main channel churned, the smaller streams feeding into the Paraopeba held the bulk of the basin’s biological wealth: 265 of the 304 taxonomic groups recorded in the entire study were found in tributaries, including 49 groups found nowhere else in the basin. These streams act as reservoirs of regional diversity and, crucially, as sources of recolonization for the damaged main channel. Invertebrates with aquatic or aerial dispersal stages drift, crawl or fly downstream and sideways from tributary mouths into degraded reaches, seeding recovery. “Tributaries are not just reference points on a map — they are where the biological diversity of the basin is held, as well as the source of the animals that recolonise the damaged channel,” Castro says. “If we lose them, the main river loses its way back.”

This reframing has direct consequences for how restoration in the basin should be planned. Conventional post-disaster remediation often concentrates on the visibly damaged main stem: dredging, stabilizing banks, removing contaminated sediment. The study’s findings imply that such work, however necessary, addresses only part of the problem. If the tributaries that supply the basin’s diversity and its colonists are themselves degraded by sewage, agriculture or sand extraction, the main river has no biological supply line from which to rebuild. Protecting tributaries and maintaining their hydrological and ecological connections to the main channel should, the authors argue, be treated as central to restoration rather than as an afterthought.

The broader lesson the researchers draw is about the nature of recovery itself. “Recovery in mining-impacted rivers is neither linear nor uniform along the channel,” Castro adds. The expectation that an impacted river moves steadily back toward a reference condition along a smooth trajectory is not supported by four years of dense biological data from the Paraopeba. Instead, recovery appears patchy, contingent and repeatedly interrupted, shaped by the interaction of the residual tailings, the seasonal flow regime and the chronic pressures of land use throughout the basin. For managers and regulators, this means that fixed timetables and single end-point targets are poor guides; sustained monitoring, of the kind this study exemplifies, is the only way to know whether a river is actually stabilizing or merely cycling through change.

Six years after Brumadinho, the Paraopeba remains a river in motion, its invertebrate communities turning over with every campaign, its tributaries holding the diversity the main channel has lost. The study offers no simple verdict of recovery or ruin. What it offers instead is something arguably more valuable: a long, high-resolution record showing that in a river burdened by both catastrophe and chronic stress, the main threat is no longer the disaster itself but the accumulated pressure that returns with every rainy season — and that the path back for the damaged channel runs through the small streams that still hold the basin’s biological memory.

Subject of Research: Long-term macroinvertebrate monitoring of the mine-tailing-impacted Paraopeba River basin in Brazil

Article Title: Paraopeba River in Brazil remains unsettled six years after dam collapse

Article References: Paraopeba River in Brazil remains unsettled six years after dam collapse. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Brumadinho, Paraopeba River, tailings dam collapse, macroinvertebrates, river health, biodiversity, tributaries, turnover, mining impact, restoration ecology, Brazil, Water Biology and Security

Surface coal mining has been the dominant land-use change in central Appalachia since the 1970s, and its footprint on water quality is well documented. When mountaintop-removal mining exposes bedrock to air and water, accelerated weathering releases dissolved inorganic salts, including sulfate, bicarbonate, calcium, and magnesium, into headwater streams. This alkaline mine drainage elevates specific conductance, a measure of the water’s ability to conduct electricity that serves as a proxy for salinity, and previous research has shown these elevated levels can persist for more than forty years. Earlier work by the same research group established that salinization, tracked through specific conductance, is the primary stressor driving declines in benthic macroinvertebrate communities across the region’s streams.

What remained poorly understood was how salinization affects conditions within a single stream. Headwater streams, the small first- and second-order channels that make up the majority of stream network length, naturally exhibit substantial variation in chemistry and physical conditions over short distances. Their insect communities also tend to show low dispersal and strong dependence on local conditions. To probe this within-stream variability, the team selected six headwater streams from a long-term monitoring network of twenty-three sites: two reference streams with spring specific conductance ranging from 17 to 52 microsiemens per centimeter, two with low-level salinization at 252 to 415 microsiemens per centimeter, and two with high-level salinization at 903 to 1175 microsiemens per centimeter.

The sampling design was unusually thorough for streams of this size. Along each stream, which ranged from roughly 1.5 to 2.8 kilometers in accessible length, the researchers established six to nine sampling reaches of fifty meters each, spaced approximately 250 to 400 meters apart from the most upstream to the most downstream point. At every reach, they sampled benthic macroinvertebrates in October 2021 and April 2022 using standard kick-net protocols, measured water quality in the field, and collected grab samples for laboratory analysis of major ions, dissolved trace elements, nutrients, and organic carbon. Habitat surveys conducted in summer 2022 documented streambed sediment composition using pebble counts, along with channel slope, canopy cover, bank stability, and riparian characteristics, yielding twenty-six habitat metrics and forty-two water quality metrics in total.

The results revealed striking within-stream variation in every stream, including the undisturbed references. Seven widely used bioassessment metrics, including EPT richness, which counts sensitive mayfly, stonefly, and caddisfly taxa, and the Virginia Stream Condition Index, a multimetric score derived from decades of regional monitoring data, varied considerably among reaches within the same stream. Most tellingly, the long-term monitoring location in each stream frequently failed to represent the median condition of the stream as a whole, often falling outside the interquartile range of within-stream values. In one low-level and both high-level salinized streams, Virginia Stream Condition Index scores straddled the impairment threshold of 60, meaning different reaches of the same stream could be classified as either impaired or unimpaired depending on where the single sample was taken.

The study also confirmed that macroinvertebrate metrics respond to within-stream gradients in specific conductance, particularly in the highly salinized streams where dilution from groundwater and tributary inputs produces a downstream decline of roughly 700 to 900 microsiemens per centimeter under baseflow conditions. In these streams, metrics expected to decline with increasing salinity, such as mayfly richness excluding the tolerant family Baetidae and scraper richness, were negatively correlated with specific conductance along the stream’s length. This mirrors the across-stream patterns documented in earlier regional studies, but demonstrates for the first time that the same stressor-response relationship operates at the scale of individual stream segments separated by only a few hundred meters.

Perhaps the most surprising finding emerged from the finer-scale analysis. Using redundancy analysis, a multivariate statistical technique that relates taxonomic abundances to environmental gradients, the researchers found that specific conductance was not always the strongest driver of community composition within individual streams. In salinized streams, significant drivers included non-purgeable organic carbon, hardness, dissolved nutrients, dissolved trace elements, and water temperature, likely because these variables covary with conductance. In reference streams, dissolved nutrients and hardness took precedence. When all six streams were pooled, specific conductance and hardness re-emerged as the primary drivers in both seasons, suggesting that the dominant controls on community structure differ depending on the scale of analysis.

Habitat and spatial position also shaped community patterns. Fine sediments and embeddedness were the top habitat variables in autumn, when low flows and overwintering life histories may make streambed conditions especially influential, whereas spring communities responded more to streambed slope and large cobbles. Spatial modeling using principal coordinates of neighborhood matrices showed that broad-scale position, meaning the distance between the most upstream and downstream samples, drove community differences within nearly every stream. Across streams pooled together, however, finer-scale spatial structure dominated, reflecting the fact that each stream functioned as a distinct cluster of similar communities. Indicator taxa also differed sharply: reference streams harbored sensitive mayflies, stoneflies, and heptageniid mayflies such as Epeorus, while salinized streams were characterized by tolerant, burrowing midges and crane flies like Chironomidae and Tipula.

The practical implications are significant. Bioassessment programs worldwide typically characterize a stream’s condition from a single sampling reach, and this study demonstrates that such a snapshot can misrepresent the true condition of a headwater stream, particularly where stressor gradients exist. The authors caution that resource constraints make multi-location sampling difficult for routine regulatory work, but they argue that awareness of within-stream variability should inform how single-location results are interpreted and where future monitoring effort is directed. For remediation planning in the central Appalachian coalfields and in salinized systems globally, from road-salt-affected streams in northern latitudes to irrigation-impacted rivers in arid regions, the message is clear: the ecological consequences of salinization unfold reach by reach, and understanding that spatial texture is essential to accurately diagnosing and restoring the health of the small streams that feed everything downstream.

Subject of Research: Effects of coal mining salinization on macroinvertebrate community variation within central Appalachian headwater streams

Article Title: Macroinvertebrate communities respond to spatial patterns of water quality and habitat within mining-influenced headwater streams of central Appalachia

Article References: Macroinvertebrate communities respond to spatial patterns of water quality and habitat within mining-influenced headwater streams of central Appalachia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15946-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15946-2

Keywords: salinization, macroinvertebrates, headwater streams, coal mining, specific conductance, bioassessment, central Appalachia, water quality, stream ecology, habitat, Virginia Stream Condition Index, alkaline mine drainage

Freshwater ecosystems are in trouble worldwide, with biodiversity declining faster in rivers, ponds and marshes than in almost any other biome. In the densely populated Swiss lowlands north of the Alps, only around ten percent of the original wetlands remain, largely because drainage infrastructure built during the twentieth century transformed waterlogged soils into farmland. That same drainage network is now ageing and increasingly expensive to maintain, creating an unexpected opening. Rather than repair the drains, some farmers are letting fields flood again, and rising temperatures have made the Swiss climate newly suitable for rice. Since the first successful trials in 2017, paddy rice cultivation has expanded under a unique regulatory framework: Swiss law restricts pesticide use in open water bodies, meaning these paddies are managed entirely without agrochemicals.

To find out whether these new paddies actually deliver on their biodiversity promise, researchers from Agroscope and partner institutions spent two years surveying every rice paddy then existing in Switzerland. They compared eleven paddies with eleven nearby wetlands, measuring water chemistry, temperature, depth and surface area while exhaustively sampling macroinvertebrates, the insects, snails, crustaceans and clams that live on and in the sediment. Macroinvertebrates are widely used as indicators of aquatic ecosystem health because their community composition responds sensitively to water quality, habitat structure and management. Sampling took place in July and August of both 2022 and 2023, using a framed net with a fine 0.5 millimetre mesh swept repeatedly across representative patches until no further animals were caught.

The environmental comparison revealed clear differences between the two habitat types. Rice paddies were, on average, far larger than the natural wetlands they were paired with, covering roughly 0.87 hectares compared with 0.19 hectares. They also had significantly higher water conductivity, a marker of nutrient enrichment linked to the organic and mineral fertilisers applied before flooding, and slightly cooler water. Water depth, dissolved oxygen and pH were statistically similar between the two habitats. In practical terms, the paddies function as large, open, nutrient-rich temporary wetlands, flooded from mid-May until shortly before the September harvest with water held at around ten centimetres, and then deliberately drained.

When the researchers tallied up the invertebrates, a nuanced picture emerged that depended on the scale of analysis. At the regional level, wetlands came out slightly ahead, supporting 58 observed taxa compared with 55 in the paddies, consistent with the greater variety of conditions across the different wetland sites. But at the local level the paddies were the clear winners: individual rice fields held significantly more taxa per site than individual wetlands, and their invertebrate densities were more than twice as high, averaging around 1,212 individuals per square metre against 448 in wetlands. The trade-off was evenness. Shannon diversity, which balances richness against dominance, was higher in wetlands, indicating that paddies pack in many individuals but are dominated by a relatively small set of well-adapted taxa.

Community composition analysis using distance-based redundancy analysis confirmed that the two habitats host genuinely different assemblages rather than simply different abundances of the same species. Habitat type was the single strongest predictor of community structure, followed by water surface area and conductivity, although the measured environmental variables together explained only 14 percent of the total variation, pointing to the additional influence of vegetation structure, dispersal and biotic interactions. Indicator species analysis singled out the dragonfly Orthetrum cancellatum and the freshwater snail Physa as significantly associated with rice paddies. Both are tolerant of fluctuating water levels and nutrient-rich conditions; the snail can survive drying through aestivation and hitchhike on waterbirds, while the dragonfly tolerates muddy substrates and brief desiccation. In contrast, the backswimmers and lesser water boatmen of the superfamily Notonectoidea, the tiny bug Plea minutissima, the mayfly genus Caenis, the isopod Asellus aquaticus and the fingernail clams Sphaerium were significantly tied to natural wetlands, reflecting their need for stable water and greater structural complexity.

The study also tested a specific management feature: ditches, channel-like depressions running along the edges of some paddies that stay flooded longer than the fields themselves. Six of the eleven paddies had them. The hypothesis was that these longer-hydroperiod microhabitats would harbour additional species, effectively embedding a more permanent wetland inside the temporary one. The results were sobering. Paddies with ditches showed slightly higher regional richness, 52 taxa versus 44, but no significant differences in local richness, Shannon diversity or density between ditched and unditched fields. Within paddies, ditch samples actually held fewer taxa and lower evenness than paddy centres, though they were deeper and slightly lower in oxygen. The researchers suggest that ditches, being small relative to the fields, may still offer suitable conditions for some wetland-affiliated species such as fingernail clams and predatory water bugs, but their contribution at the scale of whole fields remains limited.

What makes the Swiss results particularly interesting is how they compare with traditional rice-growing regions. Studies from Italy, France, Portugal, Japan and South America have consistently found that rice paddies support high local invertebrate richness and density but low evenness, dominated by disturbance-tolerant temporary-water specialists, while permanent wetlands shelter species needing stable conditions. The Swiss paddies, despite their cool-temperate climate, recent introduction and pesticide-free management, fit this same ecological template. This convergence suggests that the fundamental drivers, hydroperiod length, nutrient input and habitat homogeneity, shape paddy communities in much the same way regardless of geography, and that Swiss rice cultivation reproduces the biodiversity profile of far older paddy systems without the pesticide burden that characterises conventional production elsewhere.

The authors are careful to stress what the findings do not mean. Rice paddies cannot replace natural wetlands, which maintain higher regional diversity and support taxa absent from the fields. But they can complement them, adding substantial area, high densities and high local richness to a landscape starved of aquatic habitat. Notably, the paddies resemble the temporary wetlands that have declined most steeply in Switzerland due to river channelisation and land-use change, precisely the habitat type favoured by many amphibians and dragonflies sensitive to fish predation, which cannot establish in the seasonally drained fields. As a form of land sharing, where production and conservation occur on the same land, Swiss paddy rice therefore stands out as a rare working example in temperate Europe, a continent where most biodiversity-friendly farming schemes focus on terrestrial features like flower strips while aquatic habitats are overlooked.

Limitations remain. Sampling captured only the mid-to-late growing season, the number of independent sites was inherently constrained because the study included every paddy in the country, and factors such as fertiliser dosage, vegetation structure and landscape connectivity were not quantified. Long-term monitoring will be needed to track how these young ecosystems mature. Still, the message is striking: a crop introduced to Switzerland less than a decade ago, grown without a single pesticide, is already functioning as a meaningful wetland habitat. As climate change pushes rice cultivation further north and ageing drains make re-wetting farmland economically sensible, flood-tolerant agriculture may become an unexpected ally in one of conservation’s hardest tasks, rebuilding freshwater life in landscapes that drained it away generations ago.

Subject of Research: Aquatic macroinvertebrate biodiversity in pesticide-free cool-temperate rice paddies compared with natural wetlands in Switzerland

Article Title: Pesticide‐Free Rice Paddies Promote Diverse and Distinct Aquatic Invertebrate Communities in Cool‐Temperate Agroecosystems

Article References: Bulas, T., Schmidt, B. R., Vorburger, C., D'Haese, R., & Fabian, Y. (2026). Pesticide‐Free Rice Paddies Promote Diverse and Distinct Aquatic Invertebrate Communities in Cool‐Temperate Agroecosystems. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74287. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74287

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74287

Keywords: rice paddies, aquatic invertebrates, wetland restoration, biodiversity conservation, Switzerland, macroinvertebrates, land sharing, temporary wetlands, pesticide-free agriculture, dragonflies, community ecology, agroecosystems