Ecological impacts of water-based recreational activities on freshwater ecosystems: a global meta-analysis

Schafft, Malwina; Wegner, Benjamin; Meyer, Nora; Wolter, Christian; Arlinghaus, Robert

doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.1623

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Our work has implications for the wider discussion of whether recreational fisheries as activity and recreational‐fisheries management more generally negatively shapes biodiversity, including via the management practice of fish stocking (Eby et al, 2006; Lewin et al, 2006; Schafft et al, 2021). Our work shows that in the case of fish species diversity as conservation target, recreational fisheries will increase local fish diversity and “speed up” the colonisation time of newly created gravel pit lakes with native fishes introduced via stocking.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Fish community composition in small lakes: The impact of lake genesis and fisheries management

et al. 2022

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1. Gravel pit lakes are common across Europe. These novel ecosystems serve as model systems to study human-induced and natural colonisation of isolated lakes by fish. Fisheries-management activities can quickly spread species over large distances, possibly homogenising fish communities across ecosystems, while fostering local fish diversity.2. Our objective was to evaluate the effects of lake genesis (gravel pit lakes < 100 years old vs. natural lakes of glacial genesis ~10,000 years old) and fisheries management (fish stocking activities present vs. absent) on the fish community in small lakes, while controlling for key environmental variables known to affect lake fish communities.3. We sampled fish communities by electrofishing and multimesh gillnetting in 47 isolated lakes managed for fisheries, and 19 unmanaged and isolated lakes of both natural and artificial origin in northern Germany. Unmanaged lakes were used as reference to assess fisheries-management impacts in small natural and artificial lakes. 4. We caught 178,506 fish from 30 species and found that the accumulation of native lake fish species in lakes was associated with fisheries management, which increased local species richness (α-diversity) and number of predatory species, and reduced among-lake variation in fish community composition (β-diversity; i.e., homogenisation). The homogenisation-effect associated with fisheries happened with introduced native fish species, whereas non-native species were rarely detected. 5. In unmanaged gravel pit lakes, the littoral fish community composition was substantially different to the communities present in both types of managed lakes and unmanaged natural lakes. Therefore, the relatively young unmanaged gravel pit lakes revealed evidence of ongoing, stochastic colonisation processes that resulted in comparatively species-poor fish communities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Fish community composition in small lakes: The impact of lake genesis and fisheries management

et al. 2022

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“…More and more intensively used infrastructure can lead to pollution in riparian zones, for example through the use of road salt, which can affect plant growth (Stoler et al, 2018). Recreation can be non-consumptive and consumptive (Naiman et al, 2005;Schafft et al, 2021), the former including activities such as camping and photography, and the latter fishing and firewood cutting (Poff et al, 2011). All of these activities imply some kind of access which may lead to trampling of herbs and damage to seedlings or young shrubs and trees, which can advantage disturbance-adapted species (Manning, 1979).…”

Section: Land Use Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Pressures on Boreal Riparian Vegetation: A Literature Review

2022

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Riparian zones are species-rich and functionally important ecotones that sustain physical, chemical and ecological balance of ecosystems. While scientific, governmental and public attention for riparian zones has increased over the past decades, knowledge on the effects of the majority of anthropogenic disturbances is still lacking. Given the increasing expansion and intensity of these disturbances, the need to understand simultaneously occurring pressures grows. We have conducted a literature review on the potential effects of anthropogenic pressures on boreal riparian zones and the main processes that shape their vegetation composition. We visualised the observed and potential consequences of flow regulation for hydropower generation, flow regulation through channelisation, the climate crisis, forestry, land use change and non-native species in a conceptual model. The model shows how these pressures change different aspects of the flow regime and plant habitats, and we describe how these changes affect the extent of the riparian zone and dispersal, germination, growth and competition of plants. Main consequences of the pressures we studied are the decrease of the extent of the riparian zone and a poorer state of the area that remains. This already results in a loss of riparian plant species and riparian functionality, and thus also threatens aquatic systems and the organisms that depend on them. We also found that the impact of a pressure does not linearly reflect its degree of ubiquity and the scale on which it operates. Hydropower and the climate crisis stand out as major threats to boreal riparian zones and will continue to be so if no appropriate measures are taken. Other pressures, such as forestry and different types of land uses, can have severe effects but have more local and regional consequences. Many pressures, such as non-native species and the climate crisis, interact with each other and can limit or, more often, amplify each other’s effects. However, we found that there are very few studies that describe the effects of simultaneously occurring and, thus, potentially interacting pressures. While our model shows where they may interact, the extent of the interactions thus remains largely unknown.

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“…We are happy to see that others are building on our work and investigating the use of a broader set of quality or validity measures to weight studies in meta-analyses (e.g. Mupepele et al, 2021;Schafft et al, 2021). In the next sections, we address Pescott and Stewart's criticisms of weighting by quality scores and discuss statistical advances in applying quality score weightings to meta-analyses.…”

Section: Accuracy Weights Need Improving and Combining With Other Qua...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovation and forward‐thinking are needed to improve traditional synthesis methods: A response to Pescott and Stewart

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Amano

Martin

et al. 2022

Journal of Applied Ecology

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1. In Christie et al. (2019), we used simulations to quantitatively compare the bias of commonly used study designs in ecology and conservation. Based on these simulations, we proposed 'accuracy weights' as a potential way to account for study design validity in meta-analytic weighting methods. Pescott and Stewart (2022) raised concerns that these weights may not be generalisable and still lead to biased meta-estimates. Here we respond to their concerns and demonstrate why developing alternative weighting methods is key to the future of evidence synthesis.2. We acknowledge that our simple simulation unfairly penalised randomised controlled trial (RCT) relative to before-after control-impact (BACI) designs as we considered that the parallel trends assumption held for BACI designs. We point to an empirical follow-up study in which we more fairly quantify differences in biases between different study designs. However, we stand by our main findings that before-after (BA), control-impact (CI) and after designs are quantifiably more biased than BACI and RCT designs. We also emphasise that our 'accuracy weighting' method was preliminary and welcome future research to incorporate more dimensions of study quality.3. We further show that over a decade of advances in quality effect modelling, which Pescott and Stewart (2022) omit, highlights the importance of research such as ours in better understanding how to quantitatively integrate data on study quality directly into meta-analyses. We further argue that the traditional methods advocated for by Pescott and Stewart (2022; e.g. manual risk-of-bias assessments and inverse-variance weighting) are subjective, wasteful and potentially biased themselves. They also lack scalability for use in large syntheses that keep up-to-date with the rapidly growing scientific literature.4. Synthesis and applications. We suggest, contrary to Pescott and Stewart's narrative, that moving towards alternative weighting methods is key to future-proofing

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Ecological impacts of water-based recreational activities on freshwater ecosystems: a global meta-analysis

Cited by 21 publications

References 57 publications

Fish community composition in small lakes: The impact of lake genesis and fisheries management

Fish community composition in small lakes: The impact of lake genesis and fisheries management

Pressures on Boreal Riparian Vegetation: A Literature Review

Innovation and forward‐thinking are needed to improve traditional synthesis methods: A response to Pescott and Stewart

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