Trophic transfer efficiency (TTE) represents the proportion of energy transferred between consecutive trophic levels within a food web. Though it is a fundamental property that shapes energy flow across all ecosystem types, a comprehensive understanding of TTE in freshwater ecosystems is still lacking. This review evaluated common estimation methods, identified key influencing factors, and outlined future research priorities b...

High‐quality, yet less abundant, food sources sustain river food webs. However, the impacts of dams on these sources and their nutritional contributions to aquatic animals are not well understood. A substantial knowledge gap exists in understanding the quantitative contribution of basal food sources, such as periphyton, to aquatic animal diets and their role in supporting aquatic animals. This study fills this gap by using lon...

Hydrological connectivity in river systems facilitates the movement of animals across riverine landscapes and influences fish habitat but is threatened by climate change and water resource developments. We studied fish assemblages across a large wet–dry tropical river system in northern Australia that is under consideration for new agricultural and water resource developments, which are expected to alter hydrological connectiv...

The River Continuum Concept implies that consumers in headwater streams have greater dietary access to terrestrial basal resources, but recent studies have highlighted the dietary importance of high-quality algae. Algae provide consumers with physiologically important omega-3 (n-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), particularly eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). However, terrestrial plants and most benthic stream algae lack the lo...

Aquatic macroinvertebrates play an important functional role in energy transfer in food webs, linking basal food sources to upper trophic levels that include fish, birds, and humans. However, the trophic coupling of nutritional quality between macroinvertebrates and their food sources is still poorly understood. We conducted a field study in subalpine streams in Austria to investigate how the nutritional quality (measured by l...

Phenological responses to climate change have been widely observed and have profound and lasting effects on ecosystems and biodiversity. However, compared to terrestrial ecosystems, the long‐term effects of climate change on species’ phenology are poorly understood in aquatic ecosystems. Understanding the long‐term changes in fish reproductive phenology is essential for predicting population dynamics and for informing manageme...

Sustained water level drawdown followed by rewetting has the potential to shift macrophytes from a nutrient sink to a source, but the fate of macrophyte‐derived nutrients after rewetting is not well understood. We investigated the fate of released nitrogen (N) from isotopically labeled macrophyte litter over a 4‐week period after rewetting. We used three treatments: (1) different species in the litter (invasive Cabomba carolin...

Biotic communities are shaped by adaptations from generations of exposure to selective pressures by recurrent and often infrequent events. In large rivers, floods can act as significant agents of change, causing considerable physical and biotic disturbance while often enhancing productivity and diversity. We show that the relative balance between these seemingly divergent outcomes can be explained by the rhythmicity, or predic...

Variation in the diet‐tissue fractionation of stable nitrogen isotopes (Δ15N) is a major source of uncertainty in mixing model outputs and the calculation of trophic level in food web studies in aquatic systems. Using δ 15 N and δ 13 C of algae and consumers collected from a broad range of streams and rivers in Australia and New Guinea, we calculated Δ15N using a gradient approach, and compared these estimates with those from...