Ecological assessment of an intermittent Mediterranean river using community structure and function: evaluating the role of different organism groups

作者：Samantha Jane Hughes, José Maria Santos, María Teresa Ferreira, Rute Caraça, Ana Mendes · 发表于：Freshwater Biology · 年份：2009 · DOI：10.1111/j.1365-2427.2009.02253.x · 被引用次数：62 · 研究领域：Fish Ecology and Management Studies、Freshwater macroinvertebrate diversity and ecology、Hydrology and Sediment Transport Processes

Summary 1. Reliable lotic ecological monitoring requires knowledge of river typology, environmental factors, the effect of stressors known here as ‘pressures’ and appropriate indicators of anthropogenically induced change. We sampled benthic macroinvertebrate, fish, bird and macrophyte communities along an intermittent Mediterranean river and analysed community structure (relative abundance) and function (metrics) relative to environmental and pressure gradients in order to identify suitable indicator group(s) for future monitoring and mitigation programmes. 2. Principal components analysis revealed that scale‐dependent longitudinal differences in valley form separated narrower higher lying sites and tributaries with good quality habitats from more open degraded sites lower down the river continuum on a small floodplain and large scale pressures describing changes in land use related to agriculture with associated physical bankside and channel impacts. 3. Forward selection of variables in redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that reach scale environmental variables were selected more frequently than pressure variables for each organism group. Altitude and pH were highly redundant within and between groups, indicating essentially longitudinal structural and functional distribution patterns. Redundancy was far lower between selected pressure variables, but single or no pressure variables were retained for some organism groups indicating poor association of functional data, in parti...