Recovery from short term disturbances varies depending on the severity of the disturbance, the presence of recruitment pathways, and the presence of longer-term landscape-scale disturbances such as clearing land for grazing. Given ongoing agricultural land-use and climate change pressures, restoring pre-disturbance invertebrate communities to an altered ecosystem is likely to be unfeasible. Focusing on restoring ecosystem function, through reinstating ecosystem processes, may be an achievable alternative. Functional redundancy can provide an “insurance effect” for ecosystem processes impacted by pulse disturbances, such as sudden changes in streamflow. Functional redundancy emerges when two or more biological elements of an ecosystem contribute to the same ecosystem function and is described by species’ functional traits. To evaluate the role of functional redundancy in ecosystem recovery under different disturbance intensity, the first part of my PhD research uses surveys to describe relationships between richness, abundance, and functional redundancy in stream invertebrate communities across a gradient of catchment-scale disturbance. Fifteen streams located in southwestern Australia were sampled in spring 2020, representing sites ranging from four to 99% catchment clearing. Nutrient concentrations (TN, TP) were higher in streams with more catchment clearing; other water quality variables did not differ. richness was not higher in streams with less catchment clearing, but assemblage composition differed. Among-stream differences in taxonomic richness were high, but functional diversity differed less among streams and levels of catchment clearing. The invertebrate fauna in SWWA is naturally depauperate in EPT taxa, but functionally it is dominated by omnivores and opportunistic feeding. Functional specialist species were few and did not appear to respond to the level of catchment clearing. This widespread opportunism in feeding and life histories suggests a robust response to both long-term and pulse disturbances. This will be tested using field experiments (mBACI design) creating a pulse disturbance across levels of catchment clearing.