1. The increasing risk of wildfire has focused attention on the timescale of the impact and recovery of river ecosystems and methods for their bioassessment.
2. An 18‐year pseudo time‐series was exploited to document patterns in benthic macroinvertebrate impact and recovery and evaluate the efficacy of alternative metrics to assess fire damage. Macroinvertebrates were surveyed by kick‐sampling and data were collected on river habitats. Details of river catchments and wildfire were collated as a GIS database.
3. Macroinvertebrate richness and abundance recovered rapidly, marked by a phase of dynamic increase, followed by relative stability (0–2 years and 3–18 years, respectively). Across sites, richness and abundance were best explained by time since fire.
4. A biotic index of general river quality was ineffective as an indicator of fire damage. While a metric of K‐selected taxa (Odonata richness) was generally indicative of fire‐affected assemblages, a contrasting metric of r‐selected taxa (percentage of chironomids, baetids, and simuliids) was not.
5. Ordination analysis revealed time as a significant determinant of community structure across sites; however, its overall statistical importance was eclipsed by habitat characteristics (water quality, shade, altitude, and latitude) that were associated with ecological variation across both recently affected sites and the putatively recovered communities.
6. These results highlight the stochastic processes – environmental and ecological – that frame the macroinvertebrate response to wildfire. This probabilistic context emphasizes the difficulties of developing indicator taxa for wildfire bioassessment and reinforces the importance of standardized survey protocols and the use of contrasting metrics in the assessment of wildfire impact on the ecological quality of rivers.

中文翻译：

---

伪时间序列揭示了集水区野火后底栖大型无脊椎动物种群的快速恢复和高变异性

1. 野火风险的增加已将注意力集中在河流生态系统的影响和恢复的时间尺度上以及对其进行生物评估的方法。
2. 利用一个18年的伪时间序列来记录底栖大型无脊椎动物撞击和恢复的模式，并评估替代指标评估火灾损失的功效。通过踢取样对大型无脊椎动物进行了调查，并收集了有关河流生境的数据。将河流集水区和野火的详细信息整理为GIS数据库。
3. 大型无脊椎动物的丰富度和丰度迅速恢复，以动态增加为特征，然后是相对稳定（分别为0–2年和3–18年）。自火灾以来，在各个地点，最好用时间来解释其丰富性和丰度。
4. 一般河流质量的生物指标不能有效地作为火灾破坏的指标。虽然K选定分类群的度量标准（Odonata丰富度）通常表示受火灾影响的集合，但r选定分类单元的对比度量标准（天敌，贝蒂虫和类虫的百分比）却没有。
5. 协调分析显示时间是跨站点社区结构的重要决定因素。但是，其总体统计重要性被栖息地特征（水质，阴影，海拔和纬度）所掩盖，而这些特征与最近受灾地点和假定恢复的社区之间的生态变化有关。
6. 这些结果突显了随机过程-环境和生态-构成了无脊椎动物对野火的反应。这种概率背景强调了制定野火生物评估指标分类的困难，并强调了标准化调查协议的重要性以及在评估野火对河流生态质量的影响中使用对比指标的重要性。