Agricultural Rivers at Risk: Dredging Results in a Loss of Macroinvertebrates. Preliminary Observations from the Narew Catchment, Poland

Ecosystem deterioration in small lowland agricultural rivers that results from river dredging entails a significant threat to the appropriate ecohydrological conditions of these water bodies, expressed as homogenization of habitats and loss of biodiversity. Our study was aimed at a comparison of abundance and taxonomic structure of bottom-dwelling macroinvertebrates in dredged and non-dredged stretches of small lowland rivers and tributaries of the middle Narew River, namely: Czaplinianka, Turośnianka, Dąb, and Ślina. The experimental setup was (1) to collect samples of the bottom material from the river stretches that either persisted in a non-modified state (dredging was not done there in the last few years) or had been subjected to river dredging in the year of sampling; and (2) to analyze the abundance and taxonomic structure of macroinvertebrates in the collected samples. The study revealed that at the high level of statistical significance (from p = 0.025 to p = 0.001), the total abundance of riverbed macroinvertebrates in the dredged stretches of the rivers analyzed was approximately 70% lower than in non-dredged areas. We state that the dredging of small rivers in agricultural landscapes seriously affects their ecological status by negatively influencing the concentrations and species richness of benthic macroinvertebrates.