On the efficacy of restoration in stream networks: comments, critiques, and prospective recommendations

R code and associated data for a comment on a paper by Christopher Swan and Bryan Brown titled "Metacommunity theory meets restoration: isolation may mediate how ecological communities respond to stream restoration."

Swan and Brown (2017) recently addressed the effects of restoration on stream communities under the meta-community framework. Using a combination of headwater and mainstem streams, Swan and Brown (2017) evaluated how position within a stream network affected the outcome of restoration on invertebrate communities. Ostensibly, their hypotheses were partially supported as restoration had stronger effects in headwater streams: invertebrate taxonomic richness was increased and temporal variability decreased in restored reaches; however, these results were not consistent upon closer scrutiny for both the original paper (Swan and Brown 2017) and the later erratum (Swan and Brown 2018). This is due to issues with experimental design, improper use of statistical analyses, and discrepancies between written methods and what was actually conducted. Here, I provide a secondary analysis of the data, with hypotheses and interpretations in the context of stream, metacommunity, and restoration ecology.