Publications by authors named "Andreia Mortagua"
This work assesses the effects of river regulation on the diversity of different instream and riparian biological communities along a relieve gradient of disturbance in regulated rivers. Two case studies in Portugal were used, with different river regulation typology (downstream of run-of-river and reservoir dams), where regulated and free-flowing river stretches were surveyed for riparian vegetation, macrophytes, bryophytes, macroalgae, diatoms and macroinvertebrates. The assessment of the regulation effects on biological communities was approached by both biological and functional diversity analysis.
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- Diatoms are essential for assessing river health under the Water Framework Directive, but traditional microscopy identification is laborious and prone to disagreements.
- A new method using DNA metabarcoding and machine learning predicts diatom species based on environmental data, providing a more efficient assessment of ecological quality.
- The machine learning model, trained on data from 81 sites in Portugal, outperformed traditional methods by being more sensitive to various environmental pressures, indicating its potential for broader ecological applications.