Movement is among the most important features of fish behaviour allowing them to respond to variable conditions, within their environment, to benefit growth, survival and reproductive success (Kahler et al., 2001). Understanding how environmental variability influences fish movements can provide useful insights into ecological motivations that rule this behaviour (Nakayama et al., 2018).Dispersion movements, which contribute significantly to promote genetic flow between populations (Gouskov et al., 2016;Hughes et al., 2008), can result from a response to biotic variability, such as changes in food abundance or reproduction (Gahagan et al., 2010), or abiotic factors, such as seasonal changes in temperature, rainfall and photoperiod (Gahagan et al., 2010;Nakayama et al., 2018).Environmental variation may affect the plasticity of fish swimming, directly affecting the swimming performance (Liao, 2007;Oufiero & Whitlow, 2016). For example, if fish face an increase in flow velocity, they will need to swim faster to maintain their position in the water column (Oufiero & Whitlow, 2016;Plaut, 2001).Swimming performance is one of the most important characteristics that determines the survival of many species of fish (Plaut, 2001), and is closely related to the response to high disturbance events that

The threespine stickleback is a freshwater fish listed as endangered in Portugal, near the southern limit of the species global distribution. However, few measures have been proposed aiming at the conservation of this species in suboptimal environments. From existing databases and specific sampling campaigns, we obtained occurrence data of threespine stickleback for a total of 646 sites. The occurrence data, together with 15 environmental macrohabitat predictors, were used to model the potential distribution of the species using an ensemble of species distribution models. Through the results of our final ensemble, we project that the threespine stickleback occurs predominantly at lower stretches of river systems, where sandy substrate is dominant and flow is higher. Within this region, sticklebacks are also more likely to occur in sites with high levels of rainfall in the driest month, thus avoiding locations with high potential for drying during summer. The species also tends to avoid steep slope areas with high levels of annual precipitation. Based on our results, a map of the species probability of occurrence was generated and river sections were categorized into levels according to their importance for the species’ conservation.

No abstract

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).