Fish assemblage changes over half a century in the Yellow River, China

Abstract

Riverine environments have been threatened by anthropogenic perturbations worldwide, whereby their fish assemblages have been modified by habitat changes and nonendemic species invasions. We assessed changes in fish assemblages by comparing the species presence in historical and contemporary fish data in the Yellow River from 1965 to 2015. The temporal change in species assemblages was found with increased nonendemic species and fewer natives. Fish species richness of the river declined 35.4% over the past fifty years. Moreover, the decreased mean Bray–Curtis dissimilarity among reaches suggested that the fish assemblages of different reaches in the Yellow River were becoming more similar over time. However, temporal patterns of fish assemblages varied among reaches. In the upper Yellow River, higher species richness and more invasive species were found than those in the historical record, while the lower reaches experienced significant species loss. Dam constructions, exotic fish invasions, and flow reductions played the vital role in structuring the temporal fish assemblages in the Yellow River. It is suggested that river basins which experienced different types and levels of stressors by anthropogenic perturbations can produce varied effects on their temporal trends of species assemblages.

A review of potential factors promoting fish movement in inter‐basin water transfers, with emergent patterns from a trait‐based risk analysis for a large‐scale project in china

“…Across habitat groups, the Yangtze estuary maintained the highest number of species in the recent data set compared with the historical data set (123 out of 163; 75.5%), followed by the five lakes (average of 53 out of 87; 61%), followed by the lower main stem Yangtze River (102 out of 185; 55%). These values are similar to other studies showing recent biodiversity declines of 35%-44% of species in the lower Yangtze River, Estuary and Yellow Rivers (Liu et al, 2019;Xie, Tang, & Yang, 2018;Zhang, Zhu, & Lu, 2009).…”

Fish life history trends indicate increasing flow stochasticity in an unregulated river

“…2). We used 10,000 permutations to calculate F statistics and to assess type 1 error rates following Xie et al (2018). This approach provides nonparametric inferences for multivariate analysis of variance (Anderson 2001).…”

Comparing the Performance of an Autoregressive State-Space Approach to the Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Network for Streamflow Estimation

“…If the streamflow continues to decline at the current rates, it will deplete in 30 years for more than half of the catchments. In addition, the decrease of streamflow would also possess serious threat to groundwater recharge and discharge (Li et al, 2019), sediment transport (Wang et al, 2016), delta development (Kong et al, 2015), and fish assemblages (Xie et al, 2018).…”