Thousands of years of development have made the production and consumption of water, energy, and food for urban environments more complex. While the rise of cities has fostered social and economic progress, the accompanying environmental pressures threaten to undermine these benefits. The compounding effects of climate change, habitat loss, pollution, overexploitation (in addition to financial constraints) make the individual management of these three vital resources incompatible with rapidly growing populations and resource-intensive lifestyles. Nexus thinking is a critical tool to capture opportunities for urban sustainability in both industrialised and developing cities. A nexus approach to water, energy, and food security recognises that conventional decisionmaking, strictly confined within distinct sectors, limits the sustainability of urban development. Important nexus considerations include the need to collaborate with a wide spectrum of stakeholders, and to “re-integrate” urban systems. This means recognising the opportunities coming from the interconnected nature of cities and metropolitan regions, including links with rural environments and wider biophysical dynamics.

Lotic systems in many regions of the country have experienced habitat degradation and biodiversity loss due to agricultural activity and urbanization. Southeastern Michigan is no exception, as agriculture in the River Raisin watershed and increased urbanization in the Huron River watershed threatens both systems. To further understand the ecological impact of land use on trophic interactions in Midwestern streams and assess the use of a selected set of weighted, quantitative food web metrics as a tool for investigating the influence of anthropogenic disturbance on these systems we compared summer food webs for nine second-order streams. All streams were categorized as developed, undeveloped, or agricultural based on land cover data. Developed and undeveloped streams were located in the Huron River watershed and agricultural streams were located in the River Raisin watershed. Reach-level habitat quality was also assessed at each study site using the EPA's Rapid Habitat Assessment. Fish diets (n = 410) were analyzed to create summer food webs for each site. Comparisons of food webs were made using a suite of weighted, quantitative metrics to identify differences in fish-macroinvertebrate interactions across streams with differing land cover at the sub-basin scale and habitat quality at the local scale. Although undeveloped streams had higher species richness and less habitat degradation, no significant patterns were observed in the quantitative metrics across the three stream categories or based on reach-level habitat conditions. Decapoda, terrestrial Hymenoptera, and Chironomidae were the primary prey taxa in all stream categories. Decapods accounted for the majority of biomass consumed and the pattern of this consumption strongly influenced metric scores. The suite of quantitative metrics tested in this study did not detect significant differences in fish-macroinvertebrate food webs across land use categories, likely in part due to the dominance of a large, tolerant prey taxa in fish diets, regardless of land use and local habitat quality.