Abstract
Fish communities are important indicators of the health of riverine ecosystems. Fish monitoring for The Living Murray (TLM) initiative, one of Australia’s most ambitious restoration undertakings for the degraded river-floodplain biota of the River Murray system (south-eastern Australia), was carried out annually from 2005 to 2011 across six ‘Icon Sites’, including the habitats and reaches therein. These spatial and temporal components of variation in fish community abundance and composition must be taken explicitly into account for consistent assessment of riverine ecosystem health. To address this requirement, a standardised analytical framework, consisting of a sampling design and appropriate statistical methods, is outlined in this study. Based on an extensive dataset, multivariate patterns and univariate trends in fish community structure were analysed to show the flexibility, modularity and ability of the framework. The applicability of the framework to Turkish riverine ecosystems is then discussed with emphasis on the need for participatory discussion between researchers and environmental managers. The possibility to incorporate other measures of fish health such as biomass and condition, and to extend the proposed framework to the quantitative assessment of vegetation and bird communities also exists.
Highlights
The ecosystem health of several water bodies, and especially those acting as biodiversity hotspots, has been subjected to increasing human-induced pressure
At the Icon Site level apart from the clear segregation of LLCMM from the other icon Sites, there was a higher occurrence of oriental weatherloach Misgurnus anguillicaudatus at BarmahMillewa Forest (BMF), golden perch Macquaria ambigua and bony herring Nematalosa erebi at Chowilla Floodplain and LindsayWallpolla Island (CFLWI), flathead gudgeon Philypnodon grandiceps at Gunbower-KondrookPerricoota Forest (GKPF), European perch Perca fluviatilis at LLCMM, as well as common carp Cyprinus carpio and Murray cod Maccullochella peelii in the River Murray Channel (RMC) (Figure 2a)
Lake differed from all other habitats due to lower occurrence of all species, and Creek differed from Wetland due to higher occurrence of silver perch Bidyanus bidyanus, Macquaria ambigua, Maccullochella peelii, unspecked hardyhead Craterocephalus stercusmuscarum fulvus and MurrayDarling rainbowfish Melanotaenia fluviatilis in the former and of carp gudgeon Hypseleotris spp. in the latter (Figure 2b)
Summary
The ecosystem health of several water bodies, and especially those acting as biodiversity hotspots, has been subjected to increasing human-induced pressure. These stress factors, which include degradation of the natural flood plain, deforestation, pollution, habitat fragmentation and disruption of the hydrological regime, have led to substantial changes in the physico-chemical parameters and hydromorphological characteristics of the affected water bodies, thereby impacting on the abundance and composition of their communities (e.g., Fausch et al, 1990; Jekel, 2005; Gallardo et al, 2016). An open document concerned with the monitoring of the biological quality components of surface waters (official gazette of the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry) was published, demanding a standardised protocol to be implemented with regard to
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