Importance of environmental factors for the richness and distribution of benthic macroinvertebrates in tropical headwater streams

An understanding of the interactions among local environmental factors (e.g., physical habitat and water quality) and aquatic assemblages is essential to conserve biodiversity in tropical and subtropical headwater streams. We evaluated the relative importance of multiple physical and chemical habitat variables that influence the richness of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT) assemblages in wadeable Brazilian Cerrado (savanna) streams. We sampled macroinvertebrate assemblages and quantified physical and chemical habitat in 79 randomly selected sites in 2 Cerrado basins in southeastern Brazil. The environmental variables selected by multiple regression models (MLRs) via corrected Akaike Information Criteria (AICc) contributed significantly to variation in EPT taxon richness. The variance explained by physical-habitat variables was slightly greater in the Upper Sao Francisco Basin (adjusted R2 = 0.53) than in the Upper Araguari Basin (adjusted R2 = 0.46), and both were greater than the ...