Trends in flow intermittence for European Rivers

Tramblay, Yves; Rutkowska, Agnieszka; Sauquet, Éric; Sefton, Catherine; Laaha, Gregor; Osuch, Marzena; Albuquerque, Teresa; Alves, Helena; Banasik, Kazimierz; Beaufort, Aurélien; Brocca, Luca; Camici, Stefania; Zoltán, Csabai; Dakhlaoui, Hammouda; Girolamo, Anna Maria De; Dörflinger, Gerald; Gallart, Francesc; Gauster, Tobias; Hanich, Lahoucine; Kohnová, Silvia; Mediero, Luis; Ninov, Plamen; Parry, Simon; Quintana‐Seguí, Pere; Tzoraki, Ourania; Datry, Thibault

doi:10.22541/au.157954098.89011979

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Metacommunity approaches have seen particularly widespread, recent application in running water ecology, with the acknowledgment that in dynamic, dendritic systems reliable biomonitoring and conservation decision‐making depend on a consideration of both niche‐based and dispersal processes (Cid et al., 2020; Heino, 2013; Ruhi et al., 2017; Tonkin et al., 2018). These processes dictate community resistance and resilience to drying, the most fundamental form of ecological disturbance in rivers and streams (Leigh & Datry, 2017) and a prominent climate‐related driver of the freshwater biodiversity crisis (Piano et al., 2019; Reid et al., 2019; Tramblay et al., 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alpha and beta diversity and species co‐occurrence patterns in headwaters supporting rare intermittent‐stream specialists

Aspin¹,

House²

2022

Freshwater Biology

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Intermittent rivers are the focus of a burgeoning subdiscipline of freshwater science, driven by mounting recognition of their ubiquity, biodiversity, and climate sensitivity. However, our understanding of their ecology is hampered by a reliance on unstandardised diversity measures, an underrepresentation of certain stream types in metacommunity research and a reticence to acknowledge biotic interactions as a potentially fundamental driver of catchment‐scale patterns in assemblage composition. This study analysed both local‐ and catchment‐scale responses of invertebrates to flow intermittence and hydrological isolation in an understudied ecosystem type (low‐gradient, groundwater‐fed headwaters). We compared responses of conventional (taxonomic richness, Shannon diversity) and more robust (coverage‐adjusted Hill–Shannon) α‐diversity metrics to drying, and analysed changes in β‐diversity components as a function of hydrological and spatial distances between samples. We also inferred the influence of biotic interactions on metacommunity structure, using hierarchical species distribution modelling to capture species‐to‐species associations after accounting for hydrological variability and dispersal traits. The conventional and robust α‐diversity metrics exhibited broadly similar shifts, although richness overestimated the decline in α‐diversity with intermittence and the Shannon index failed to detect a significant interaction between flow duration and hydrological isolation. Decomposition of β‐diversity revealed a dominance of species turnover over nestedness along the flow gradient, a finding contrary to prevailing conceptual wisdom in intermittent river ecology and one we attribute to the climatic and geological context of our study. Even after accounting for differences in hydrological niche occupation, we discovered a significant propensity for species to co‐occur with others of similar conservation status, implying that competition/colonisation trade‐offs involving rare specialists and widespread generalists could underpin metacommunity assembly in some drying headwater networks. Our results suggest that enhancing aquatic habitat connectivity in headwaters harbouring intermittent‐stream specialists could be counterproductive, and conservation plans should instead look to safeguard isolated habitats serving as biotic refuges for rare species.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alpha and beta diversity and species co‐occurrence patterns in headwaters supporting rare intermittent‐stream specialists

Aspin¹,

House²

2022

Freshwater Biology

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“…In addition, the taxonomic richness of families with traits promoting resistance and/or resilience to drying (our ‘high RR’ group) responded only to impacts—not drying—but this response was weak, due to low taxonomic richness. As rivers experience increasing climate‐driven drying (Tramblay et al., 2021), our results highlight the need to develop region‐specific indices for use in ecological status assessments. By identifying priority sites for further investigation, such assessments can inform management actions that support biodiversity within dynamic river ecosystems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Disentangling responses to natural stressor and human impact gradients in river ecosystems across Europe

Stubbington

Sarremejane

Laini

et al. 2021

Journal of Applied Ecology

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“…By extending the widely applied flow regime concept (Poff et al., 1997) to non‐perennial streams, the conceptual drying regime framework presented here could be used to develop holistic management strategies for the >50% of global river length that dries. While recent work has found that mean annual hydrologic characteristics of non‐perennial streams have spatial coherence (Hammond et al., 2021) and are undergoing widespread change (Tramblay et al., 2021), limited focus has been on characterizing event‐scale stream drying behavior. As a result, it is unclear both how components of stream drying (duration, rate, frequency, and magnitude; Table ) vary through space and time, and how different aspects of stream drying may cascade to impact ecological and biogeochemical processes both locally and in downstream waters.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Drying Regimes of Non‐Perennial Rivers and Streams

Price

Jones

Hammond

et al. 2021

Geophysical Research Letters

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The aquatic sciences have a long tradition of connecting hydrologic variability to ecosystem function by characterizing ecologically important components of the flow regime, such as the timing, duration, frequency, magnitude, and rate of change of flow (Poff et al., 1997). While the flow regime paradigm continues to be important for advancing the understanding and management of lotic ecosystems (Palmer & Ruhi, 2019), there is a need to extend this perspective to aquatic systems that dry, referred to as non-perennial rivers (Busch et al., 2020). Non-perennial rivers comprise the majority of global river networks (Datry, Larned, & Tockner, 2014;Goodrich et al., 2018;Yu et al., 2020) and are predicted to increase in extent due to further human alterations and climate change (Jaeger et al., 2014;Ward et al., 2020). From local to global scales, non-perennial rivers play an important role in material storage and downstream transport (Jaeger et al., 2017), habitat partitioning for riparian plants and aquatic organisms (Schilling et al., 2020), and biogeochemical processing of carbon (Shumilova et al., 2019;von Schiller et al., 2019).

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Trends in flow intermittence for European Rivers

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

Alpha and beta diversity and species co‐occurrence patterns in headwaters supporting rare intermittent‐stream specialists

Alpha and beta diversity and species co‐occurrence patterns in headwaters supporting rare intermittent‐stream specialists

Disentangling responses to natural stressor and human impact gradients in river ecosystems across Europe

The Drying Regimes of Non‐Perennial Rivers and Streams

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