The impact of river regulation on the biodiversity intactness of floodplain wetlands

The natural flow regime of many rivers around the world is affected by human impacts such as water extraction, climate change and especially the building of dams for hydropower or water storage. Alteration of the natural flow regime is considered to be a major threat to biodiversity in river floodplain ecosystems.

Measurements of quantitative relationships between flow regime change and biodiversity are incomplete and inconclusive. This hampers the assessment of human impacts on riverine floodplain wetlands in global biodiversity evaluations. In this article, the scientific literature and extracted information from existing data sets for a meta-analysis were systematically reviewed to unravel a general quantitative understanding of the ecological consequences of altered flow regimes.

From 28 studies both ecological and hydrological data were retrieved. The relative mean abundance of original species (MSA) and the relative species richness were used as the effect size measures of biodiversity intactness. The meta-analysis showed that alteration of a natural flow regime reduces the MSA by more than 50% on average and species richness by more than 25%. The impact on species richness and abundance is related to the degree of hydrological alteration.

These results are used in strategic quantitative assessments by incorporating the relationships into global models on environmental change and biodiversity such as GLOBIO-Aquatic.

Authors

Kuiper, J.J., Janse, J.H., Teurlincx, S., Verhoeven, J.T.A., Alkemade, R.

Specifications

Publication title: The impact of river regulation on the biodiversity intactness of floodplain wetlands
Publication date: 12 June 2014
Publication type: Publication
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11273-014-9360-8
Magazine: Wetlands Ecology and Management
Product number: 935