Neglecting biodiversity baselines in longitudinal river connectivity restoration impacts priority setting.

Wegscheider, Bernhard; Waldock, Conor; B. Calegari, Bárbara; Josi, Dario; Brodersen, Jakob; Seehausen, Ole (2024). Neglecting biodiversity baselines in longitudinal river connectivity restoration impacts priority setting. (In Press). The Science of the total environment, p. 175167. Elsevier 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.175167

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River habitats are fragmented by barriers which impede the movement and dispersal of aquatic organisms. Restoring habitat connectivity is a primary objective of nature conservation plans with multiple efforts to strategically restore connectivity at local, regional, and global scales. However, current approaches to prioritize connectivity restoration do not typically consider how barriers spatially fragment species' populations. Additionally, we lack knowledge on biodiversity baselines to predict which species would find suitable habitat after restoring connectivity. In this paper, we asked how neglecting these biodiversity baselines in river barrier removals impacts priority setting for conservation planning. We applied a novel modelling approach combining predictions of species distributions with network connectivity models to prioritize conservation actions in rivers of the Rhine-Aare system in Switzerland. Our results show that the high number and density of barriers has reduced structural and functional connectivity across representative catchments within the system. We show that fragmentation decreases habitat suitability for species and that using expected distributions as biodiversity baselines significantly affects priority settings for connectivity restorations compared to species-agnostic metrics based on river length. This indicates that priorities for barrier removals are ranked higher within the expected distributions of species to maximize functional connectivity while barriers in unsuitable regions are given lower importance scores. Our work highlights that the joint consideration of existing barriers and species past and current distributions are critical for restoration plans to ensure the recovery and persistence of riverine fish diversity.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE)
08 Faculty of Science > Department of Biology > Institute of Ecology and Evolution (IEE) > Aquatic Ecology

UniBE Contributor:

Wegscheider, Bernhard, Waldock, Conor Alexander, Borges Calegari, Bárbara, Josi, Dario, Brodersen, Jakob, Seehausen, Ole

Subjects:

500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology

ISSN:

1879-1026

Publisher:

Elsevier

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pubmed Import

Date Deposited:

12 Aug 2024 11:50

Last Modified:

13 Aug 2024 00:17

Publisher DOI:

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.175167

PubMed ID:

39127207

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Barrier prioritization Explainable AI Fish habitat Restoration Species distribution models

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/199633

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/199633

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