Repeat disturbances have cumulative impacts on stream communities

(1) Climate change has altered disturbance regimes in many ecosystems, and predictions show that these trends are likely to continue. The frequency of disturbance events plays a particularly important role in communities by selecting for disturbance-tolerant taxa. (2) However, ecologists have yet to disentangle the influence of disturbance frequency per se and time since last disturbance, because more frequently disturbed systems have also usually been disturbed more recently. Our understanding of the effects of repeated disturbances is therefore confounded by differences in successional processes. (3) We used in-situ stream mesocosms to isolate and examine the effect of disturbance frequency on community composition. We applied substrate moving disturbances at five frequencies, with the last disturbance occurring on the same day across all treatments. Communities were then sampled after a recovery period of 9 days. (4) Macroinvertebrate community composition reflected the gradient o...