Preliminary studies on potential effect of climate change on stream ecology assessment by using BIOMOD

Dissertação de Mestrado, Ecohidrologia, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2012Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century for biodiversity conservation (www.conservationafrica.org) . Global warming is expected to be associated with diverse changes in freshwater habitats in north-western Europe (Cordellier, 2009). Macroinvertebrates are an important component of biodiversity in stream ecosystems and studies of macroinvertebrates are an estimation of the stream’s response to aquatic biodiversity and it is desirable and valuable to assess the climate change impact (Clarke et al. 2008). A model becomes a useful tool for a better representation of the expected changes. The present study was conducted by using the macroinvertebrate data base from the states Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz of Germany. After modelling a current and future distribution (occurrence probability) of 304 macroinvertebrates, the model outputs were collected. The values of probability occurrence of each species in each point from the grid cell was extracted by using ArcGis 10. The single species layer information was achieved, which can be used to predict the climate change impact on their community and individual species. A correlation was made by using model output probability values with abundance (raw sampling data). The range of correlation was -0.08 to 0.94 by using ‘R’ software package 2.14.1. A correlation analysis was made by taking high negative, low and high positive correlated species. According to our single species information from our preliminary study and result comparison with existing literature it was noticed that some species were listed under Red list species and some are going to be threatened in near future due to climate change episode. Another part of the present work was conducted to assess the stream quality by using ASTERICS, an EU developed assessment software for stream quality assessment in Europe by using macroinvertebrate data. With the present abundance record of macroinvertebrates, saprobic index, EPT % (abundance class) and degradation of river morphology metrics were calculated by using this assessment software. In our present investigation the saprobic index mean value was 1.98 and 1.73 for large and small stream type; 9 and 5 respectively. EPT % (abundance class) index had no significant relation in both types of streams and general degradation of river morphology was noticed in both types of streams. Quality class was compared between 9 and 5 stream types and these results are discussed