The Role of Hydrographic Mapping in the Study of Emerging Aquatic Insects on the Landscape Scale

Abstract

Emerging aquatic insects constitute one of the main biological flows connecting aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. In a landscape, there are many sources of emergence, which vary in space and time. Thus, they must be clearly defined when studying the inland dispersal of aquatic insects. In this study, we defined five types of hydrographic networks (including or not including ponds and ditches) on the basis of cartographic data of varying degrees of detail (from OpenStreetMap to field map) in order to explain the abundance of aquatic insects. We sampled Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, Trichoptera, and Megaloptera (ETPM) with 64 sticky traps homogeneously covering a 75 ha agricultural landscape. The abundance of aquatic insects is logically better explained by the hydrographic networks recorded directly in the field than by the reference network, which is incomplete (OpenStreetMap). The results show that, depending on the sampling period, not all water bodies in the landscape are necessarily sources of emergence. To our knowledge, the issue of defining the sources of emerging aquatic insects has never been raised. Based on a practical example, this short note shows that, by refining the hydrographic network to better match the sources of emergence, the explanatory power of inland aquatic insect abundance can be greatly improved.