Poor correlation between large-scale environmental flow violations and freshwater biodiversity: implications for water resource management and the freshwater planetary boundary
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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
Poor correlation between large-scale environmental flow violations and freshwater biodiversity: implications for water resource management and the freshwater planetary boundary
Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Abstract. The freshwater ecosystems around the world are degrading, such that
maintaining environmental flow1 (EF) in river
networks is critical to their preservation. The relationship between
streamflow alterations (subsequent EF violations2) and the freshwater biodiversity response is well established at the scale of stream reaches or small basins (∼<100 km2). However, it is unclear if this relationship is robust at larger scales, even though there are large-scale initiatives to legalize the EF requirement. Moreover, EFs have been used in assessing a planetary boundary3 for freshwater. Therefore, this study intends to conduct an
exploratory evaluation of the relationship between EF violation and
freshwater biodiversity at globally aggregated scales and for freshwater
ecoregions. Four EF violation indices (severity, frequency, probability of
shifting to a violated state, and probability of staying violated) and seven
independent freshwater biodiversity indicators (calculated from observed
biota data) were used for correlation analysis. No statistically significant negative relationship between EF violation and freshwater biodiversity was found at global or ecoregion scales. These findings imply the need for a holistic bio-geo-hydro-physical approach in determining the environmental flows. While our results thus suggest that streamflow and EF may not be the only determinant of freshwater biodiversity at large scales, they do not preclude the existence of relationships at smaller scales or with more holistic EF methods (e.g., including water temperature, water quality, intermittency, connectivity, etc.) or with other biodiversity data or metrics.
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