Recipient Organization
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
886 CHESTNUT RIDGE RD RM 202
MORGANTOWN,WV 26505-2742
Performing Department
Forestry
Non Technical Summary
Freshwater ecosystems make up only 0.01% of all surface water on Earth, yet host about 10% of all known species, including one third of all vertebrates (Balian et al. 2008). These ecosystems also provide critical ecosystem services, such as regulation of climate and the provision of water supply, food, fuel, and fiber (Costanza et al. 2014). However, despite fundamental ecological roles and economically important products and services freshwater systems provide, they are amongst the more imperiled ecosystems on Earth. Habitat loss and degradation, pollution, modification of hydrology and climate, overexploitation and the introduction of non-native species are some of the stressors that have led to declines of 83% of populations of freshwater vertebrates (Reid et al. 2019).How freshwater organisms respond to these environmental stresses is a core question that needs to be addressed across regions to inform potential conservation actions that can benefit species and ecosystems. This proposal builds on the P.I.'s expertise on developing research in geographically different regions, as well as on current and potential future collaborations to address this question regionally and internationally. Regionally, West Virginia faces several conservation challenges including, increased pollution loads, habitat degradation and spread of invasive species. For example, as described through this proposal, although coal mining has a major importance for the State's economy, it results in large-scale loss and fragmentation of West Virginia's forested habitats and cause enormous impacts on aquatic systems. In addition, WV water bodies are impaired by pollutants (e.g., mine drainage constituents), sewage and livestock waste (like nutrients and pathogens), sediment, and habitat destruction. Aquatic systems of other states in the US are threatened by similar combination of stressors.Internationally, Amazonian aquatic systems, for example, have been the focus of infrastructure development, with continuous expansions of hydropower plants, urbanization, roads, and cleaned areas for agricultural and pasture. More than 400 large dams are operating and another 330 are planned for the coming decades for the Amazon River Basin alone (Winemiller et al. 2016). Deforestation is also widespread. Although a basin-wide assessment of land cover changes in aquatic ecosystems is still missing, over the past 40 years, large areas of floodplains in the lower Amazon River (56%) were deforested for agriculture. Both, regionally and internationally, the effects of global climate change on aquatic systems, including changes in temperature and extreme weather events (strong droughts and flooding), have been reported for many regions.These multiple stressors have altered hydrological regimes, sediment transport, and water quality, thereby, impacting aquatic biodiversity and production and food web dynamics across these regions. For example, research I developed in collaboration with colleagues in the Guadalupe River, TX, showed that without flow pulses of sufficient magnitudes and frequencies, river-floodplain lateral connectivity among floodplain habitats is reduced, or inexistent (Bower et al. 2019). Losses of connectivity impede fish dispersal and flow of energy and matter among habitats, negatively affecting fish diversity and food web interactions. Another study showed that alterations in hydrological regimes and land cover led to shifts in spatial temporal patterns of fish assemblage structure and biotic homogenization through declines, or losses, of species and their ecological traits (i.e., any feature of organisms that affect its performance or fitness) (Arantes et al. 2018, 2019b, 2019a, Arantes et al. in review). Ultimately, all these impacts affect the provision of services and constituents of human well-being including health, recreational activities and fisheries that sustain livelihoods, and food security of millions of people (Dugan et al. 2010).This study will improve understanding of change processes on aquatic biodiversity, fisheries and communities' livelihoods, which is imperative to mitigate the social and ecological effects of these impacts, and to inform planning and decision-making on future infrastructure development and/or conservation strategies. Ecological and anthropogenic processes that occur in aquatic systems are driven by multiple deterministic and stochastic mechanisms that operate across a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. To deal with this complexity, this project will use an integrative approach that simultaneously considers different aspects of aquatic biodiversity in multiple scales and regions to facilitate mechanistic interpretations of potential effects of impacts on aquatic systems and ecological communities (e.g., Villéger et al. 2017).This research will thus advance scientific knowledge of environmental impacts on different aspects of biodiversity and aquatic systems, including species populations and communities, food webs dynamics, watershed characteristics, and aquatic production (e.g., fisheries). Given its interdisciplinary nature, the proposal will also study human responses to impacts and potential adaptions on their livelihoods. This will provide a much-needed holistic evaluation of the conservation problems aquatic systems are facing, which can aid information to water resources managers as they confront difficult decisions related to water uses and infrastructure development. In practical terms, in WV for example, the results can contribute to state agencies to assess the impacts of environmental change as part of federally mandated revisions to state conservation action plans. Internationally, the studies will provide scientific evidences to input discussions and decisions involving rapid expansions of infrastructure (e.g., hydropower development in the Amazon).In addition, the results will drive further grant opportunities by enabling future analyses (e.g., synergetic effects of multiple drivers of aquatic degradation, other impacts that may not be timely addressed in this proposal- e.g., gas exploration on ecological communities). The data, results, and other products will be largely shared and made available for public, conservation practitioners, water resource managers, and researchers.
Animal Health Component
45%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
40%
Applied
45%
Developmental
15%
Goals / Objectives
The overarching goal of this proposal is to evaluate whether and how aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity respond to environmental gradients and major impacts (i.e., land cover, hydrology and climate alteration, overfishing, pollution, and invasive species) in different scales and geographic regions. The proposal also aims to disseminate results and engage institutions and stakeholders related with aquatic matters to propose collaborative solutions to these conservation challenges. To achieve these goals, this proposal will address the following 5 objectives:To quantify and understand environmental change process effects on aquatic populations and communities. To achieve this objective, the proposal will study: (i) key parameters of population dynamics, including reproduction, recruitment, growth, survival, and abundance of aquatic organisms, and (ii) the taxonomic and functional diversity, structure and biomass/abundance distribution of ecological communities across aquatic systems under different levels of impacts.To quantify and understand environmental change process effects on aquatic food webs. To do this, the proposal will use methods largely applied to study food web ecology, including stomach content and stable isotope analyses. We will quantify food web proprieties across aquatic systems under different levels of impacts, including species trophic position, niche breadth and overlap, food chain length, flow of energy and matter across the ecosystems, and the relative contributions of alternative sources of production to aquatic fauna biomasses.To understand/quantify environmental changes process effects on watershed quality and processes. To achieve this objective, this proposal will evaluate patterns of water quality and hydrological parameters, as well as geographical features of the landscape. The quantifications of parameters such as temperature and moisture, the magnitude and timing of flow and discharge, number and size of dams, and amount of land cover types within watersheds will provide a spatial evaluation of habitat quality. Secondly, these data can be linked to other data to enable analyses of populations and communities (obj 1), food webs (obj 3) and social aspects (obj 4) responses to changes in watersheds quality.To understand and quantify environmental changes process effects on fisheries, fishers/anglers' livelihoods. To do this, the proposal will use surveys and participatory approaches (e.g., interviews, participatory mapping, social network analyses) to quantify possible variations/changes in catches production and composition, and to understand its impacts on peoples livelihoods (e.g., income) and possible adaptations that may take place in response to impacts.To disseminate results and propose collaborative solutions to these conservation challenges. The main goal is to provide a venue for divulgation of results while also engaging stakeholders related with aquatic matters to discuss implications and solutions.
Project Methods
This study will be based on several sources of data including data that has been collected or will be collected in situ or using remote sensing techniques and will also use different analytical approaches to address each of the 5 objectives, as explained below:To quantify and understand environmental change process effects on aquatic populations and communities the proposal will use traditional and novel techniques to analyze population and community aspects. Traditional methods such as measurements of fish age through otolith or scale growth rings, or estimate of age of first sexual reproduction through gonadal observation, and recruitment based on age classes distributions can be used to estimate key population parameters to understand their responses/changes under anthropogenic impacts. At the community level,we will use approaches to partitioning diversity in different components to explain variation in diversity and its components along environmental gradients (e.g., Hewitt et al. 2005, Legendre 2014, Socolar et al. 2016), andmultivariate analyses to investigate the potential influence of environmental gradients on structure of aquatic assemblages.In addition, we will use analysis of functional trait diversity which facilitate inference about mechanisms driving dynamics and thus provide an opportunity to increase generality and profitability of ecological responses to environmental variation. To do this, we will classify or quantify species traits that are shown to confer sensitivity of species to environmental disturbance (Arantes et al., 2019b, 2019a), including those associated with species life-history, feeding and swimming/microhabitat-use strategies (e.g., degree of body compression and eye position in fishes, phenotypes that influence fitness along environmental gradients (Gatz 1981, Winemiller 1991). Several different statistical analyses can be used to understand ecological traits or functional diversity responses to impacts, including modeling biomass of groups of species having different functional traits as a function of linear predictors (e.g., gradients of land cover, or pollutants, or hydrological changes), and calculating functional diversity measures such as functional richness and functional dispersion (Laliberte and Legendre 2010). Functional diversity measures can be compared, or modeled, over space and time (e.g., across rivers/stream reaches under different degrees of impact).?To quantify and understand environmental change process effects on aquatic food webs, the proposal will use stomach content and stable isotope analyses. Analyses of fatty acid and lipids can be eventually used as well. Dietary information allows the study of temporal, spatial and ontogenetic change in feeding strategies. Stomach contents can be separated into broad prey categories and prey groups and prey species can be quantified. The volume of each category, as well as the volume of the empty stomach can be used in order to calculate stomach fullness and the contribution of the different food items to the diet. Univariate or multivariate analysis of variance, or regression analyses, can be used to evaluate the effects of environmental variables, and other co-variables (season, body size, invasive species presence, or absence) on diet composition.Food web variation across environmental gradients can also be explored with stable isotope analysis. Muscle tissue of organism and common basal resources were, or will be, collected for conducting analysis of naturally occurring isotopic ratios of elements such as carbon (C) and nitrogen (N). Nitrogen isotopic ratios (15N/14N as expressed by δ15N) can be used to estimate the trophic position of an organism, andCarbon isotopic ratios (13C/12C, or δ13C) often are useful for identifying sources assimilated by consumers (Peterson and Fry 1987, Post 2002). This proposal may use and contrast/compare several proprieties that can be derived from on isotopic ratios of elements including estimates of trophic pathways (Peterson and Fry 1987), trophic niche breadth and overlap (Layman et al. 2007), and food chain length (Post 2002) as well as estimates of the relative contributions of alternative sources to aquatic fauna biomasses.To quantify and understand environmental change process effects on watershed quality and processes, the proposal will build on collaborations (e.g., Arantes et al., 2018, 2019a) to collect data using remote sensing techniques, and data that will be, or has been, collected in situ. Water parameters can be measured in situ (e.g., temperature, pH, turbidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen (DO), fecal coliform, phosphorous, and nitrogen). Data can also be derived from several online sources (e.g., water level can be obtained from gauges from different agencies (e.g., US: National Water Information System: Web Interface- USGS, Amazon: Agência Nacional de Águas ANA, www.hidroweb.ana. gov.br). Land cover, watershed boundaries, and geographic features data can also be derived from online databases such as the USGS Earth Explorer site, among others. Based on combinations of satellite imagery data and fieldwork data we can calculate areas of land cover types such as forest cover, urbanization, agricultural lands, etc., for different scales (e.g., watersheds, or buffers). As mentioned, to achieve this objective, I expect to build on current collaborations and engage in new collaborations, including faculty and research groups at WVU and the West Virginia GIS Technical Center.?To understand and quantify environmental change process effects on fisheries, and fishers/anglers' livelihoods the proposal will use data on fisheries, livelihoods and adaptation as described as follows. The fishery data can be derived from several sources, such as monitoring systems based on recordings of data from fishing trips which are available or can be collected. For example, I have been working with fishing monitoring datato investigate dams impacts on fisheriesin the Madeira river. About 27,700 fishing trips were registered, including yield (kg), taxa, and effort (fishers/day) as well as market value of each taxa caught (Arantes et al. In review). Other examples of regions we possess large databases for fisheries include the Amazon and Xingu Rivers. Based on these data, we can calculate catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) for all taxa together (multispecies) and/or for each taxon and/or for functional groups to investigate questions such as whether and how CPUE changes over time and space according to environmental changes. For example, CPUE can be modeled as a function of linear predictors, including measures of land cover, presence and absence of barriers, hydrological metrics.Likewise, the impacts of changes on peoples livelihoods and possible adaptations to impacts will be assessed through interviews addressing household livelihood assets, income, and adaptation in fishing strategies (e.g., effort may increase, and fishing locations and gears used may change in response to impact on fish resource) as well as changes in fish consumption and market strategies. This approach is being currently used in a manuscript that is in preparation using interview data from an NSF/INFEWs project which I am collaborating with (Arantes et al. in prep). Eventually, my research program will expand this sort of investigation for aquatic resources production and fisheries/anglers of other regions, including West Virginia.?The dissemination of results and development of collaborative solutions to conservation challenges will be achieved through publication of the project's findings in academic and non-academic settings and sharing with managers, decision-makers, and stakeholders. Workshops will also facilitate results delivery while engaging stakeholders in a conversation about possible solutions and critical next steps and remaining gaps in the science to support conservation efforts.