The Influence of Riparian Corridor Land Use on the Pesquería River’s Macroinvertebrate Community (N.E. Mexico)

Abstract

The Earth's freshwater ecosystems are currently under threat, particularly in developing countries. In Mexico, intensive land use and inadequate monitoring policies have resulted in the severe degradation of the country's freshwater ecosystems. This study assesses how the macroinvertebrate communities in the Pesquería River, located in Northeastern Mexico, are affected by riparian land use, in order to determine their potential use as bioindicators to evaluate the macroinvertebrate integrity of the Pesquería River. First, we characterized the land use cover in the riparian channel. Second, we sampled 16 sites for benthic macroinvertebrates along the main channel during the wet and dry seasons. Third, we evaluated the influence of the riparian channel land use on the macroinvertebrate community using 42 different biological metrics. The land use characterization depicted a riparian channel mainly influenced by agricultural and urban land use. Eighty-one invertebrate taxa were identified during the study. Permutational analysis of the variance analysis confirmed significant differences across the different land use classes and the macroinvertebrate community composition while no differences were found between seasons. The indicator species analysis revealed 31 representative taxa for natural land use, 1 for urban, and 4 for agricultural land use. Our modelling analysis showed that 28 of the 42 biological metrics tested responded significantly to land use disturbances, confirming the impact of land use changes on the Pesquería River's macroinvertebrate communities and suggesting that these metrics may have a use as bioindicators. Finally, this study may provide significant biological information for further studies in similar conditions.

What Do Students Know about Rivers and Their Management? Analysis by Educational Stages and Territories

“…It is well known by ecologists and managers that bioindicators are the best current tool to evaluate the health of ecosystems as a whole because they not only assess instantaneous water quality, but they integrate numerous environmental factors (both biotic and abiotic), long-term conditions, and large spatial scales [36,37]. Consequently, bioassessment tools have been broadly adopted to evaluate the ecological status of inland waters (e.g., the U.S. Clean Water Act, the Canadian Protection Act, and the European Water Framework Directive), and constant efforts are made to improve and adapt them, or create new ones for regions (e.g., Mexico, Peru, Ecuador) and river typologies (e.g., non-perennial streams) that lack them [38,39]. Indeed, the inclusion of biological indicators in the EU legislation as the main tool to assess river health entailed a paradigm shift in river management within Europe, recognizing the river ecosystem concept and leaving behind management that focused on water quality that reduced rivers to water channels [36].…”

The past is never dead: legacy effects alter the structure of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages

“…Anthropogenic land use is a widespread and common threat to lotic ecosystem health (Allan, 2004;Reid et al, 2019;Vitousek, 1997). The linkages of contemporary land use and in-stream processes have been studied since the latter half of the last century (Allan et al, 1997;Allan, 2004;Castro-López et al, 2019;Ferreira et al, 2014;Maloney & Weller, 2011). However, anthropogenic land use and cover can have effects lasting long after it has ceased (Maloney et al, 2008).…”

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“…Among them are the Watumokala River which is in rural areas and the Nokambu River which is in urban areas. The Watumokala River is a rural river characterized by agriculture with anthropogenic land use activities around the riverbanks, forests, agriculture, fields, rice fields, and rural settlements (Castro-López et al 2019). Meanwhile, the Nokambu River is a river that is characterized as an urban river with urban activities having dense residential development due to urbanization (Yuan et al 2022), which causes an increase in the need for residential development (Ghaisani and Pigawati 2020), thus having an impact on river ecosystem disruption (Atharinafi and Wijaya 2021;Suprayogi et al 2022), thus affecting the life of aquatic biota in rivers (Carrasco-Badajoz et al 2022).…”