Effects of anthropogenic salinization on biological traits and community composition of stream macroinvertebrates

Salinized rivers: degraded systems or new habitats for salt-tolerant faunas?

“…100 mS cm 21 [3]). Short-term responses to increased salinization are clear: reduced biodiversity [4,5], altered ecosystem processes [6], changed composition [7,8] and altered trait composition of communities [9,10]. Anthropogenic salinization of rivers is creating novel environments by introducing a strong selective force (salinity) to systems dominated by another strong selective force (unidirectional flow).…”

Species and trait compositions of freshwater nematodes as indicative descriptors of lake eutrophication

“…Nevertheless, based on the deduced sets of indicator trait modalities it was possible to discriminate among the three trophic lake states. Other biomonitoring studies surveying macrobenthic assemblages demonstrated that trait approaches possessed a higher or at least the same level of indicative power for a range of human impacts as classical taxonomic measures (Charvet et al, 1998;Doledec et al, 2006;Szöcs et al, 2014). It must be noted, however, that the efficiency of our preliminary trait-based approach to assess shifts in the nematode assemblage due to eutrophication was restricted by several conceivable reasons: (1) The number of included species (30), traits (7 traits encompassing 28 modalities) and the accuracy of their description was inevitably limited despite an in-depth research of the literature.…”

“…(4) The predicted and often reported higher predictability of trait-based analyses is also attributable to the fact that the number of functional descriptors often remained far below the number of taxonomic units, in particular when aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages are studied (e.g. Statzner and Beche, 2010;Szöcs et al, 2014). As a result, the total inertia (sum of all eigenvalues) is lower for functional than taxonomic data (Heino et al, 2007).…”

The Response of Grain Potential Productivity to Land Use Change: A Case Study in Western Jilin, China

“…Although the conversion of grassland to farmland increased the total grain potential productivity in Western Jilin, it caused serious damages to the environment [37,38]. For example, grassland reclamation not only destroyed the grassland resources and reduced the coverage rate of vegetation, but it also broke the balance between salt and water in soil, exacerbated soil moisture evaporation and the salt accumulation process, and triggered soil salinization [39][40][41]. The conversion of marsh to farmland also was important for the increase in grain potential productivity between 1975 and 2000 and caused the total grain potential productivity to increase by 0.21 million tons.…”

“…Although the area of forest converted into farmland was greater than the area of marsh converted into farmland, the increase in grain potential productivity caused by the conversion of forest to farmland (0.19 million ton) was less than that caused by the conversion of marsh to farmland. This was because forest is often found in regions of higher elevation or greater slope which are not suitable for growing crops [41][42][43][44].…”