Responses of Macroinvertebrate Assemblages to Flow in the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau: Establishment and Application of a Multi‐Metric Habitat Suitability Model

Abstract

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP), also known as the Third Pole Region, is the largest high-altitude land mass on Earth. The region holds the most freshwater, mainly in the form of glaciers, outside the polar ice caps (Morton, 2011). The QTP is of critical ecological importance, possessing diverse biomes (alpine tundra, montane forest, subtropical dry forest, and tropical montane rainforest; Ni & Herzschuh, 2011), and encompasses several biodiversity hotspots (e.g., in the mountainous areas of Central Asia, Himalayas, Indo-Burma, and Hengduan range; Tang et al., 2006). The river and stream biota in the QTP are highly specialized owing to the unique conditions, making them especially vulnerable to external disturbances (Favre et al., 2015;Xu et al., 2018;Yao et al., 2012). Environmental conditions that have been intensively modified by anthropogenic activities and climate warming during recent decades include instream flows, jeopardizing the services provided by alpine rivers with healthy ecosystems (Poff et al., 1997;Wenger et al., 2011).

From responses of macroinvertebrate metrics to the definition of reference metrics and stressor threshold values

“…The approach developed has several advantages, including making the nature of interactions between stressors themselves and between stressors and their responses more explicit in the context of African ecosystems, where communities and their expected responses to stress are poorly documented. This would further improve our knowledge of these interactions (de Vries et al 2021b; Zhou et al 2022;Brooks et al 2021). Furthermore, the approach offers exibility and potential for extension to many other biological systems, as it could incorporate expert advice, where available, in an explicit and reproducible manner, and also account for small sample sizes, high variability in transitional environments, and uncertainties in designing experimental protocols (Drouineau et al 2010).…”

Environmental Factors Shape the Differences in Biodiversity-Area Relationships in Riverine Macroinvertebrates of Two Rivers in the Tibetan Plateau in China

“…This resulted in discovering a total of 30 articles. In the 30 articles, we searched for study area and study species, resulting in 7 relevant research papers (including 2 articles in Chinese) [55][56][57][58][59][60][61] from which species inventories could be extracted for specific sample sites. We obtained benthic macroinvertebrate presence/absence data from tables, appendices, and associated databases cited.…”

Evaluation of habitat quality and ecological flow in a regulated waterway

“…To more accurately and comprehensively evaluate the impact of river regulation in the habitat of many types of fish in the entire life cycle, through the field investigation and literature research of the target fish habitat, combined with the relevant experience of fishery workers, the flow velocity and water depth indexes were selected as the main environmental factors affecting the survival of fish, and the suitability index curves of target species in different life stages were constructed accordingly (Figure 6). The habitat suitability index (HSI) was used to quantify the suitability of the target fish habitats, and the higher the HSI value, the better the suitability (Zhou et al 2022). Water Supply Vol 00 No 0, 8…”