100 years of anthropogenic impact causes changes in freshwater functional biodiversity

Despite efforts from scientists and regulators, biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate. Unless we find transformative solutions to preserve biodiversity, future generations may not be able to enjoy nature’s services. We have developed a conceptual framework that establishes the links between biodiversity dynamics and abiotic change through time and space using artificial intelligence. Here, we apply this framework to a freshwater ecosystem with a known history of human impact and study 100 years of community-level biodiversity, climate change and chemical pollution trends. We apply explainable network models with multimodal learning to community-level functional biodiversity measured with multilocus metabarcoding, to establish correlations with biocides and climate change records. We observed that the freshwater community assemblage and functionality changed over time without returning to its original state, even if the lake partially recovered in recent times. Insecticides and fungicides, combined with extreme temperature events and precipitations, explained up to 90% of the functional biodiversity changes. Community-level biodiversity reliably explained freshwater ecosystem shifts whereas traditional quality indices (e.g. Trophic Diatom Index) and physicochemical parameters proved to be poor metrics for these shifts. Our study advocates the advantage of high throughput systemic approaches on long-term trends over species-focused ecological surveys to identify the environmental factors that cause loss of biodiversity and disrupt ecosystem functions. © 2023, eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.