Nicotine is a ubiquitous emergent pollutant that primarily enters the environment through inappropriate disposal of cigarette butts. In a 7-week monitoring program, we collected 56 water samples from 14 lakes, 9 ponds, 9 rivers, 8 canals, and 2 canalized brooks in Berlin. Nicotine was detected in all investigated surface waters.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn mobile animals, selection pressures resulting from spatio-temporally varying ecological factors often drive adaptations in migration behavior and associated physiological phenotypes. These adaptations may manifest in ecologically and genetically distinct ecotypes within populations. We studied a meta-population of northern pike (Esox lucius) in brackish environments and examined intrapopulation divergence along environmental gradients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland navigation is one of the most sustainable transport alternatives to help decarbonise the world economy. However, the likely impacts of intensifying inland navigation on freshwater ecosystems are difficult to predict. A global map of knowledge that considers both abiotic and biotic responses to increasing shipping traffic and developing infrastructures is lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn-stream habitat enhancement is widely used to improve ecological conditions in rivers, often prioritizing key fish life stages such as spawning and juvenile development. However, no standard approaches exist to predict their effects on fish recruitment and populations. Here, we use a spatially-explicit population dynamics model that integrates functional habitat dynamics to assess the impact of two rehabilitation measures in a hydropower-impacted section of the Inn River (SE Germany) on the recruitment potential of four rheophilic and lithophilic fish species - grayling, nase, barbel, and chub.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInland navigation in Europe is proposed to increase in the coming years, being promoted as a low-carbon form of transport. However, we currently lack knowledge on how this would impact biodiversity at large scales and interact with existing stressors. Here we addressed this knowledge gap by analysing fish and macroinvertebrate community time series across large European rivers comprising 19,592 observations from 4,049 sampling sites spanning the past 32 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystem-based management is costly. Therefore, without rigorously showing that it can outperform traditional species-focused alternatives, its broad-scale adoption in conservation is unlikely. We present a large-scale replicated and controlled set of whole-lake experiments in fish conservation (20 lakes monitored over 6 years with more than 150,000 fish sampled) to examine the outcomes of ecosystem-based habitat enhancement (coarse woody habitat addition and shallow littoral zone creation) versus a widespread, species-focused alternative that has long dominated fisheries management practice (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpecies distribution models (SDMs) have been widely applied to predict geographic ranges of species across space and time under the assumption of niche conservatism (i.e., species niches change very slowly).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobally, policies aiming for conservation of species, free-flowing rivers, and promotion of hydroelectricity as renewable energy and as a means to decarbonize energy systems generate trade-offs between protecting freshwater fauna and development of hydropower. Hydroelectric turbines put fish at risk of severe injury during passage. Therefore, comprehensive, reliable analyses of turbine-induced fish mortality are pivotal to support an informed debate on the sustainability of hydropower (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman presence at water bodies can have a range of ecological impacts, creating trade-offs between recreation as an ecosystem service and conservation. Conservation policies could be improved by relying on robust knowledge about the relative ecological impacts of water-based recreation. We present the first global synthesis on recreation ecology in aquatic ecosystems, differentiating the ecological impacts of shore use, (shoreline) angling, swimming and boating.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRestoration of spawning and juvenile habitats is often used to restore fish abundances in rivers, although often with unclear results. To study the effects of habitat limitations on the common barbel (Barbus barbus), a riverine litophilic cyprinid fish, an age-structured population model was developed. Using a Bayesian modeling approach, spawning and fry (0+ juvenile) habitat availability was integrated in the model in a spatially explicit way.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ongoing digital revolution in the age of big data is opening new research opportunities. Culturomics and iEcology, two emerging research areas based on the analysis of online data resources, can provide novel scientific insights and inform conservation and management efforts. To date, culturomics and iEcology have been applied primarily in the terrestrial realm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
September 2020
The ecological niche is a key concept for elucidating patterns of species distributions and developing strategies for conserving biodiversity. However, recent times are seeing a widespread debate whether species niches are conserved across space and time (niche conservatism hypothesis). Biological invasions represent a unique opportunity to test this hypothesis in a short time frame at the global scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe reliability of transferring species distribution models (SDMs) to new ranges and future climates has been widely debated. Biological invasions offer the unique opportunity to evaluate model transferability, as distribution data between species' native and introduced ranges are geographically independent of each other. Here, we performed the first global quantitative synthesis of the spatial transferability of SDMs for 235 invasive species and assessed the association of model transferability with the focal invader, model choice and parameterisation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpecies conservation, river rehabilitation, stock enhancement, environmental impact assessment and related planning tools require indicators to identify significant impacts but also mitigation success. Since river systems are shaped by disturbances from floods and droughts, typical riverine fish species should have evolved life history traits providing resilience against such disturbances. This study compiled and analyzed resilience traits of European lampreys and fish species to derive a novel sensitivity classification of species to mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGravel pit lakes are novel ecosystems that can be colonized by fish through natural or anthropogenic pathways. In central Europe, many of them are managed by recreational anglers and thus experience regular fish stocking. However, also unmanaged gravel pits may be affected by stocking, either through illegal fish introductions or, occasionally, by immigration from connected water bodies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Total Environ
January 2019
Recreational and commercial navigation is omnipresent, rendering European large rivers highways for cargo vessels, passenger ships and sport boats. Any types of motorized vessels create waves and drawdown eroding shallow shore areas. Consequently, inland navigation alters the living environment of fish with specific habitat requirements on nursing, hatching and spawning along shorelines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEuropean large rivers are exposed to multiple human pressures and maintained as waterways for inland navigation. However, little is known on the dominance and interactions of multiple pressures in large rivers and in particular inland navigation has been ignored in multi-pressure analyzes so far. We determined the response of ten fish population metrics (FPM, related to densities of diagnostic guilds and biodiversity) to 11 prevailing pressures including navigation intensity at 76 sites in eight European large rivers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBarriers represent one of the largest anthropogenic impacts on the ecological status of rivers, and they also potentially restrict fishes' ability to respond to future environmental changes. Thus, river management aims to restore the longitudinal connectivity of rivers to allow continuous migration and movement of water, sediments and biota. However, it is often unclear whether the targeted barriers are also those most relevant for fish species, particularly to track future habitat shifts caused by environmental change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRiver restoration is a main emphasis of river management in European countries. Cross-national comparisons of its implementation are still rare in scientific literature. Based on French and German national censuses, this study compares river restoration practices and monitoring by analysing 102 French and 270 German projects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe future distribution of river fishes will be jointly affected by climate and land use changes forcing species to move in space. However, little is known whether fish species will be able to keep pace with predicted climate and land use-driven habitat shifts, in particular in fragmented river networks. In this study, we coupled species distribution models (stepwise boosted regression trees) of 17 fish species with species-specific models of their dispersal (fish dispersal model FIDIMO) in the European River Elbe catchment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo compensate for fairway enlargements and the hydraulic impacts of navigation activity, an artificial rehabilitation structure was constructed in the urban, navigable River Spree in 2004. This wave-protected, shallow littoral zone proved to be highly effective in reducing vessel-induced waves and provided suitable conditions for the development of aquatic plants. However, in time it became less suitable for other aquatic organisms due to hypoxic conditions in late summer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF