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      Climate change poised to threaten hydrologic connectivity and endemic fishes in dryland streams.

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          Abstract

          Protecting hydrologic connectivity of freshwater ecosystems is fundamental to ensuring species persistence, ecosystem integrity, and human well-being. More frequent and severe droughts associated with climate change are poised to significantly alter flow intermittence patterns and hydrologic connectivity in dryland streams of the American Southwest, with deleterious effects on highly endangered fishes. By integrating local-scale hydrologic modeling with emerging approaches in landscape ecology, we quantify fine-resolution, watershed-scale changes in habitat size, spacing, and connectance under forecasted climate change in the Verde River Basin, United States. Model simulations project annual zero-flow day frequency to increase by 27% by midcentury, with differential seasonal consequences on continuity (temporal continuity at discrete locations) and connectivity (spatial continuity within the network). A 17% increase in the frequency of stream drying events is expected throughout the network with associated increases in the duration of these events. Flowing portions of the river network will diminish between 8% and 20% in spring and early summer and become increasingly isolated by more frequent and longer stretches of dry channel fragments, thus limiting the opportunity for native fishes to access spawning habitats and seasonally available refuges. Model predictions suggest that midcentury and late century climate will reduce network-wide hydrologic connectivity for native fishes by 6-9% over the course of a year and up to 12-18% during spring spawning months. Our work quantifies climate-induced shifts in stream drying and connectivity across a large river network and demonstrates their implications for the persistence of a globally endemic fish fauna.

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          Adaptation to natural flow regimes.

          Floods and droughts are important features of most running water ecosystems, but the alteration of natural flow regimes by recent human activities, such as dam building, raises questions related to both evolution and conservation. Among organisms inhabiting running waters, what adaptations exist for surviving floods and droughts? How will the alteration of the frequency, timing and duration of flow extremes affect flood- and drought-adapted organisms? How rapidly can populations evolve in response to altered flow regimes? Here, we identify three modes of adaptation (life history, behavioral and morphological) that plants and animals use to survive floods and/or droughts. The mode of adaptation that an organism has determines its vulnerability to different kinds of flow regime alteration. The rate of evolution in response to flow regime alteration remains an open question. Because humans have now altered the flow regimes of most rivers and many streams, understanding the link between fitness and flow regime is crucial for the effective management and restoration of running water ecosystems.
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            Climate change and freshwater ecosystems: impacts across multiple levels of organization.

            Fresh waters are particularly vulnerable to climate change because (i) many species within these fragmented habitats have limited abilities to disperse as the environment changes; (ii) water temperature and availability are climate-dependent; and (iii) many systems are already exposed to numerous anthropogenic stressors. Most climate change studies to date have focused on individuals or species populations, rather than the higher levels of organization (i.e. communities, food webs, ecosystems). We propose that an understanding of the connections between these different levels, which are all ultimately based on individuals, can help to develop a more coherent theoretical framework based on metabolic scaling, foraging theory and ecological stoichiometry, to predict the ecological consequences of climate change. For instance, individual basal metabolic rate scales with body size (which also constrains food web structure and dynamics) and temperature (which determines many ecosystem processes and key aspects of foraging behaviour). In addition, increasing atmospheric CO(2) is predicted to alter molar CNP ratios of detrital inputs, which could lead to profound shifts in the stoichiometry of elemental fluxes between consumers and resources at the base of the food web. The different components of climate change (e.g. temperature, hydrology and atmospheric composition) not only affect multiple levels of biological organization, but they may also interact with the many other stressors to which fresh waters are exposed, and future research needs to address these potentially important synergies.
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              Climate change meets habitat fragmentation: linking landscape and biogeographical scale levels in research and conservation

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
                1091-6490
                0027-8424
                Sep 23 2014
                : 111
                : 38
                Affiliations
                [1 ] School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH 44691; and jaeger.48@osu.edu.
                [2 ] School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and.
                [3 ] School of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
                Article
                1320890111
                10.1073/pnas.1320890111
                25136090
                9b2b41d2-efaa-4ed9-a591-1b9f7001bc4a
                History

                barriers,fragmentation,groundwater extraction,temporary streams

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