Responses of stream macroinvertebrate communities to progressive forest harvesting: Influences of harvest intensity, stream size and riparian buffers

Although numerous papers describing impacts of forest harvesting on invertebrate communities in streams have been published previously, our study is novel in several ways: ▶ we conducted annual surveys over 17 yrs, which allowed us to examine both impact and trajectories of recovery; ▶ we examined impacts in streams that varied in harvest intensity, as opposed to surveying clearcut catchments; ▶ we examined differences in harvest impacts for different sized streams. We found that the largest impacts on stream macroinvertebrate communities occurred after harvesting of riparian vegetation, and that smaller streams were more severely impacted than larger streams, but that the recovery time for smaller streams was shorter than for larger streams.