
ProfessorAngus McIntosh
Qualifications
Research Interests
I work at all levels in freshwater ecosystems, ranging from population and community ecology through to ecosystem and aquatic landscape ecology, including work on fish and invertebrates in streams, lakes and wetlands. I’ve been particularly interested in aquatic food webs, predator-prey interactions, the influences of flow-related habitat size and disturbance in rivers, exchanges between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and restoration and rehabilitation. This has included long-running studies in the upper Waimakariri River system in Canterbury, at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado and in agricultural streams of the Canterbury Plains. Important aspects include investigations of:
- effects of non-native trout on galaxiid fishes,
- riverscape configuration influences on fish and other aquatic biodiversity,
- changes in river habitat size (e.g. through alteration in flows) on river food webs,
- habitat drying on pond communities,
- connections between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (cross-ecosystem influences)
-restoration of agricultural streams in the Canterbury Waterway Rehabilitation Experiment (CAREX).
See the FERG (Freshwater Ecology Research Group) pages for more details on this research and my EcologyLive website (see link under Resources above) for photographs, stories and information of interest to a wider audience.
Recent Publications
- Crichton BRJ., Hickford MJH., McIntosh AR. and Schiel DR. (2023) Predicting biomass of resident kōkopu (Galaxias) populations using local habitat characteristics. PLoS ONE 18(3 March) http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261993.
- Hogsden K., O’Brien S., Bartlett S., Warburton H., Devlin H., Collins K., Febria C., Goeller B., McIntosh A. and Harding J. (2023) Riparian plant species offer a range of organic resources to stream invertebrate communities through varied leaf breakdown rates. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 57(1): 136-151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00288330.2021.2005637.
- Barrett IC., McIntosh AR., Febria CM., Graham SE., Burdon FJ., Pomeranz JPF. and Warburton HJ. (2022) Integrative analysis of stressor gradients reveals multiple discrete trait-defined axes underlie community assembly. Ecosphere 13(7) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4164.
- Greig HS., McHugh PA., Thompson RM., Warburton HJ. and McIntosh AR. (2022) Habitat size influences community stability. Ecology 103(1) http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3545.
- Herse MR., Lyver POB., Gormley AM., Scott NJ., McIntosh AR., Fletcher D. and Tylianakis J. (2022) A demographic model to support customary management of a culturally important waterfowl species. Ecology and Society 27(3) http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-13410-270314.