Riparian plants provide an important source of energy for freshwater food webs through inputs of leaf litter. Planting riparian buffers with mixed species could enhance the detrital resource supply for invertebrates through varied leaf breakdown rates. To quantify leaf breakdown rates and invertebrate colonisation, we used leaves from eleven grass, shrub and tree species common along agricultural waterways in New Zealand. Brea...

Introduced aquatic macrophytes can dominate small agricultural waterways in summer and autumn becoming a significant management problem. Excessive growth can clog waterways, causing drainage issues and reducing agricultural productivity while in‐stream velocities are reduced and sedimentation increased. Consequently, water managers remove them by mechanical clearance, chemical spray and cutting which can be costly and have neg...

Excessive macrophytes can cause significant problems in agricultural waterways requiring active management. Conventional control techniques can have a range of adverse effects. We investigated several control tools in two experiments: firstly, we tested eight treatments at a small‐scale (2 m × 2 m). We found intensive hand weeding, weed mat and herbicide spraying to be effective treatments, reducing macrophyte cover to