Data for: Ecological pathways connecting drought to stream invertebrate community shifts across space and time

Climate change is intensifying droughts via reduced snowpack and accelerated snowmelt in high mountains globally, altering community structure in snow-dependent rivers. To predict impending ecological change in rivers, we must understand the importance of the abiotic and biotic mechanisms connecting hydrologic change to biodiversity change–and whether these mechanisms operate similarly across space and time. Here, we studied abiotic effects of drought and invertebrate communities in a minimally disturbed watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada. Our study employed a highly-replicated design of 60 nested sites (capturing microhabitat to reach-level variation) and over two decades of change (2002 to 2023) in a subset of sites, including the driest period on record. We used Spatial Stream Network (SSN) models and autoregressive (AR) models to partition the spatial and temporal variance into covariate-driven vs. autocorrelation effects. Structural equation modeling allowed us to identify cau..., , , --- title: \"Ecological pathways connecting riverine drought to community change across space and time\" author: Kyle Leathers date: August 13, 2025 output: md_document ------------------- ## Manuscript abstract Climate change is intensifying droughts via reduced snowpack and accelerated snowmelt in high mountains globally, altering community structure in snow-dependent rivers. To predict impending ecological change in rivers, we must understand the importance of the abiotic and biotic mechanisms connecting hydrologic change to biodiversity change–and whether these mechanisms operate similarly across space and time. Here, we studied abiotic effects of drought and invertebrate communities in a minimally disturbed watershed in California’s Sierra Nevada. Our study employed a highly-replicated design of 60 nested sites (capturing microhabitat to reach-level variation) and over two decades of change (2002 to 2023) in a subset of sites, including the driest period on record. We used Spatial...,