Identifying priority aquatic refuges to sustain freshwater biodiversity in intermittent streams in eastern Australia
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Rose, Peter
Bond, Nick
Bunn, Stuart
Kennard, Mark
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Abstract
- The hydrological variability of intermittent streams means that the spatial distribution of dry season aquatic refuges within river networks and the temporal dynamics of hydrological connectivity between them are critical for the persistence of aquatic biodiversity. Here a new approach is demonstrated to identify surface waterbodies as priority refuges for efficient conservation management of freshwater biodiversity in intermittent stream networks.
- Recently developed models of daily streamflow and surface water extent are used to represent spatio-temporal variations in hydrological connectivity and surface water persistence within river networks of eastern Australia over a 107-year period. Using this information, systematic conservation planning is applied to prioritise aquatic areas for conservation of 25 fish species under two scenarios. One scenario identifies priority refuges to complement those already occurring in existing protected areas, while the other did not consider protected area status.
- The identified priority networks concentrated on the main stems of river catchments where surface water was more likely persistent and aquatic refuges were more likely connected, but also included headwaters for rare fish species. All three set conservation targets for the 25 fish species can be met in the best solution of priority networks. Although the second scenario achieves the targets with a smaller size of priority network overall, it requires more new aquatic refuges and thus is less efficient than the first scenario.
- The newly developed datasets are useful for freshwater conservation prioritisation because they account for hydrological variability of intermittent streams. The applied systematic prioritisation approach is transferable to other regions and freshwater taxa to identify aquatic refuges for biodiversity conservation within intermittent stream systems.
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Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems
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© 2022 The Authors.Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialLicense, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
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Conservation and biodiversity
Environmental management
Freshwater ecology
Agricultural, veterinary and food sciences
Biological sciences
Environmental sciences
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Yu, S; Rose, P; Bond, N; Bunn, S; Kennard, M, Identifying priority aquatic refuges to sustain freshwater biodiversity in intermittent streams in eastern Australia, Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 2022