A new protocol for assessing the conservation priority of groundwater‐dependent ecosystems

Abstract

Species of conservation concern are usually considered important elements in site prioritization for biodiversity conservation. To overcome the lack of information on species conservation status, multidimensional measures of species rarity can be used as proxies of species vulnerability. Under this assumption, a two‐step protocol for site prioritization of aquatic groundwater‐dependent ecosystems is proposed using invertebrate vulnerability estimated from species' traits. In the first step, each species occurring in the sites of interest are scored according to their vulnerability. In the second step, sites are prioritized using species' scores. Species vulnerability scores are based on five dimensions, for which various traits are scored: (i) geography, (ii) ecology, (iii) biology, (iv) population, and (v) evolutionary history. For each species, the scores of the various traits belonging to the same dimension are multiplied to obtain a synthetic score. These scores are then ranked into four classes and, for each dimension, each species receives a new score that reflects its rank. The sum of these scores represents the species' overall score. Site conservation priorities are assessed by combining species scores into three indices: Sum of Species Scores, Biodiversity Conservation Concern (which relates the sum of species scores with the local species richness) and Groundwater Biodiversity Concern (which is the average of the former two). The protocol is illustrated using case studies in Italy and it is fully implemented in the software AQUALIFE which is freely available at: http://app.aqualifeproject.eu by registered users. Sensitivity analyses showed that the protocol is robust against the lack of information on species biology or sampling limitations. However, trait scoring rests with the user, who must be familiar with the study group. This approach can be applied at any spatial scale and to different types of aquatic groundwater‐dependent ecosystems.

Jumping into the grids: mapping biodiversity hotspots in groundwater habitat types across Europe

“…It is a species-trait indicator and was scored in five classes: holoendemic -species whose distribution is limited by ecological and physiological tolerance (score = 1); euryendemic -species with broad, more or less continuous or contiguous distribution, limited by biogeographical barriers (score = 2); stenoendemic -species with restricted, more or less continuous or contiguous distribution, limited by biogeographical barriers (score = 3); rhoendemic -species with widely disjunct distribution due to either vicariance or jump dispersal (score = 4); spot endemic (or microendemic) -species occurring in one locality only (score = 5) (Supplementary material Data 1). Scores were attributed following Myers and De Grave (2000) with a few adjustments allowing a better resolution of the degrees of endemicity observed in stygobitic species (Fattorini et al 2020). Species constrained by geographical barriers were considered less able to cope with environmental changes as so requiring priority in conservation.…”

“…The prioritization of areas deserving management and/or conservation measures in nowadays approached in different ways (Rabelo et al 2018, Fattorini et al 2020, mainly delimiting geographical areas following the outcomes of Species Distribution Modeling and hotspots' identification (Brunetti et al 2019, Cerasoli et al 2019, Iannella et al 2019a. The Gi* statistics by Getis and Ord (1992) was used to identify hotspots (or coldspots) of stygobitic harpacticoid biodiversity using the six biodiversity indicators (Supplementary material Appendix 1 Note A1).…”

Between darkness and light: spring habitats provide new perspectives for modern researchers on groundwater biology

“…Even if the transitional and ecotonal role of springs is known and studied since several decades, and the term Groundwater Dependent Ecosystems applied to springs (Fattorini et al, 2020;Rohde, Froend & Howard, 2017) allows to study the connected network of surface and subterranean ecosystems following the 'holistic' approach suggested by Linke et al (2019), these concepts are rarely translated in ecological and evolutionary studies dealing with groundwater animals. The results of our systematic review broadly suggest that springs and other boundaries with surface environments should be considered and investigated as part of subterranean habitats and of the biology of at least some stygobionts.…”

Advancing measurements and representations of subsurface heterogeneity and dynamic processes: towards 4D hydrogeology

“…Growing societal needs imply that subsurface environments, which form part of the critical zone of the Earth (Brantley et al, 2007;Fan et al, 2019), are increasingly subject to pressure and multiple (possibly competing) uses for water resources such as groundwater abstraction, artificial recharge and storage (Dillon et al, 2019;Russo and Lall, 2017;Aeschbach-Hertig and Gleeson, 2012), nuclear waste storage (e.g., Ewing, 2015, Butler, 2010, geothermal energy (Rivera et al, 2017;Fleuchaus et al, 2018;Lu, 2018), oil and gas extraction (e.g., Wang et al, 2014) and climate change mitigation such as energy storage (Arbabzadeh et al, 2019) and CO2 sequestration (Hamza et al, 2021, Kumar et al, 2020 while being threatened by anthropogenic contamination (e.g., Riedel et al, 2020). As a result, subsurface systems are experiencing profound modifications that affect their basic environmental functions and ecosystem services (Erostate et al, 2020;Fattorini et al, 2020;Luijendijk et al, 2020). These modifications include, both at the local and the catchment scales, water level depletion (Jasechko et al, 2021), which affects baseflow of many rivers and associated ecosystem services (Conant et al, 2019), a growing input of chemicals and pathogens, which threaten water quality (e.g., Szymczycha et al, 2020), seawater intrusion (Werner et al, 2013) and soil salinization (Litalien and Zeeb, 2020;Singh, 2021) threatening soil-and water https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2022-95 Preprint.…”