Landscape - pressure – fish - cascades
Abstract
Environmental conditions across whole landscapes clearly impact instream habitats and biological communities; however, these linkages are not well understood and have not been synthesized for European streams and rivers. For many years, aquatic research has focused on the response of biota to the local instream environment. Investigators now recognize that land-use patterns at the landscape scale are a principal threat to the ecological integrity of river ecosystems, impacting habitat, water quality, and the biota via numerous and complex pathways. This innovative and efficient project, LANPREF, will apply recent advances in landscape ecology to the assessment of aquatic ecosystems. The LANPREF project contains four unique innovations. First, it will utilize new spatial databases that contain standardised and consistent spatial data on land use/cover, rivers, and catchments at the European scale. The LANPREF project will also take advantage of an enormous data set, containing more than ten thousand fish sampling sites from 16 European countries with profound information on hydromorphologic and water quality pressures compiled as part of the EU project EFI+. Using these existing resources and the combined expertise of the project collaborators, we will provide the first insights into the effects of land use patterns on aquatic organisms across the European continent. We use Burcher’s concept of “land cover cascades” (Burcher et al. 2007) and extend it to other pressures. In this way, we consider spatially-nested relationships through which land-cover change and other disturbances are propagated from larger to smaller spatial scales. Novel statistical tools and a dataset large enough to enable stratification across environmental characteristics will help us to identify and interpret covariation between pressures and the natural environment, providing a better understanding of mechanistic processes underlying the landscape – pressure – fish relationship. We will quantify the degree to which current relationships are influenced by the legacies of past land use and other pressures. The project’s second innovation will be to work simultaneously over multiple spatial scales. We will apply our unique expertise in GIS and spatial technologies to identify those spatial scales at which land-use and/or other pressures and fish communities are most tightly coupled. Our third innovation will be to work not only with compositional metrics (e.g., quantities of land-use within a catchment) but to develop and analyze metrics describing landscape and pressure configuration (e.g. distribution of patches, connectivity of vegetated areas) and to quantify their impacts on fish communities. Finally, LANPREF will build on cooperative international partnerships with colleagues in the Pacific Northwest, USA, to enable novel comparative analyses and a synthesis of landscape impacts on fish communities across continents and across extremely different land-use histories.
keywords land use spatial scale human pressures index of biotic integrity riverine fish
Publikationen
Is land use an adequate surrogate for river morphology and water quality?
Autoren: Trautwein, C., Schinegger, R., Schmutz, S. Jahr: 2010
Conference & Workshop proceedings, paper, abstract
Human pressures and their impacts on Austrian rivers
Autoren: Schinegger R., Trautwein C., Schmutz S. Jahr: 2010
Conference & Workshop proceedings, paper, abstract
Gewässerforschung im Zeichen der Fische
Autoren: Schinegger, R., Trautwein, C., Schmutz, S. Jahr: 2011
Newspaper / Magazine article
Cumulative effects of land use on fish metrics in different types of running waters in Austria
Autoren: Trautwein, C; Schinegger, R; Schmutz, S Jahr: 2012
Journal articles
Multiple human pressures and their spatial patterns in European running waters
Autoren: Schinegger, R; Trautwein, C; Melcher, A; Schmutz, S Jahr: 2012
Journal articles
Pressure-specific and multiple pressure response of fish assemblages in European running waters
Autoren: Schinegger, R; Trautwein, C; Schmutz, S Jahr: 2013
Journal articles
LANPREF FWF Jahresbericht 2011
Autoren: Trautwein, C., Schinegger, R., Schmutz, S., Jahr: 2012
Forschungsbericht (extern. Auftraggeber)
LANPREF FWF Endbericht
Autoren: Trautwein, C., Schinegger, R., Schmutz, S., Jahr: 2013
Forschungsbericht (extern. Auftraggeber)
Divergent reaction of fish metrics to human pressures in fish assemblage types in Europe
Autoren: Trautwein, C; Schinegger, R; Schmutz, S Jahr: 2013
Journal articles
SPECIFIC AND MULTIPLE HUMAN PRESSURES AND THEIR IMPACTS ON FISH ASSEMBLAGES IN EUROPEAN RUNNING WATERS
Autoren: Schinegger, R., Jahr: 2013
Doctoral Thesis
Project staff
Stefan Schmutz
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Stefan Schmutz
stefan.schmutz@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-81202
Project Leader
01.07.2009 - 31.10.2012
Rafaela Schinegger
Ass.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Rafaela Schinegger
rafaela.schinegger@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-85334
Project Staff
01.07.2009 - 31.10.2012