Invertebrate biodiversity is improving in England’s rivers, long-term trends show
Rivers across England have seen a significant improvement in river invertebrate biodiversity since 1989, shows a study led by UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) researchers.
The study, which involved one of the largest and most wide-ranging analyses of long-term monitoring data in the world – spanning over 30 years, found improvements in invertebrate biodiversity across all regions and river types in England.
This improvement is all the more surprising given English rivers are amongst the most highly exposed to wastewater and other pressures in Europe. The recent State of Nature report shows that the overall abundance of species in Great Britain has declined on average by 19%. For terrestrial invertebrates the decline is unequivocal, but this is not the case for freshwater invertebrates.
Published in Science of the Total Environment, this latest analysis adds weight to a growing body of evidence showing that freshwater invertebrate species have been moving towards recovery across England and Europe since the 1990s.
The study analysed data from up to 223,300 routinely collected freshwater records from the Environment Agency across England between 1989 and 2018. The researchers looked at the presence of invertebrate families like dragonflies, snails, mayflies, shrimp and worms which respond to changes in water quality. They examined how the presence and numbers of each family changed over time at each location.
Nationally, the long-term trend is positive. The average number of families of freshwater invertebrates found at each site increased from 15 to 25 between 1989 and 2018. Overall, this is an average 66% increase in the number of invertebrate species observed in England’s rivers over the past 30 years. However, this rate of improvement began to slow for some groups from 2003 onwards.
These trends are seen across every river type, from upland to lowland, from rural to urban, and in areas with low to high levels of arable farming. Rivers with higher exposure to wastewater or pesticides were less rich in invertebrates, yet these sites also showed improvement. Given the universality of this improvement and its timing, which coincide with declines in some key chemical pollutants, these trends across England’s rivers may be linked.
Crucially, the data show that families that are particularly sensitive to river pollution, like mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies, are recovering most strongly of all. The diversity of these species improved by 300% overall, rising from an average of 3 families recorded at each site in 1989 to 10 families in 2018. This recovery continued until 2003 when the rate of biodiversity improvement for some other families started to level off.
While there is still room for improvements and there are many local issues still to tackle, at the national scale England’s rivers now provide far better habitats for invertebrates than they did 30 years ago. To an extent where, for some invertebrate species, England’s rivers have reached the target ecological standard for populations to thrive.
Lead author Professor Andrew Johnson, principal scientific officer at UKCEH, said: “Long-term monitoring has shown us a dramatic improvement in the biodiversity of freshwater invertebrates over the past 30 years across all river types at the national scale. Similar trends are also observed across Europe, and in the decades during which changes in legislation around water treatments and restoration projects have been introduced driven by EU policies. This suggests that water quality improvements have been effective at allowing freshwater biodiversity to recover. Since these trends are also observed across Europe, it suggests that water quality improvements, consistent with changes in legislation around wastewater treatments and associated restoration projects, have been effective at improving freshwater biodiversity. The implication is that given good legislation, resources and regulation, we can reverse biodiversity decline.
“We now need to understand more about the role chemical changes or conservation measures have had in achieving this recovery in England’s freshwater invertebrates, and to what degree current levels of pollution affect wildlife in relation to other issues.”
The analysis accounted for geographical factors like latitude, altitude and the slope of the waterway, alongside wastewater exposure and the type of land each river flowed through. It also considered the effect of invasive species, finding the increase in the distribution of such species across the sample sites was only modest and could not on its own account for the overall trend in biodiversity.
The study included researchers from UKCEH and Brunel University London. It was funded by the National Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.
JOURNAL
Science of The Total Environment
ARTICLE TITLE
Significant improvement in freshwater invertebrate biodiversity in all types of English rivers over the past 30 years
Advancing biodiversity research: new initiative bridges biodiversity and omics data standards
Biodiversity observation and research rely more and more on biomolecular data.The standardization this data, encompassing both primary and contextual information (metadata), is crucial for enabling data (re-)use, integration, and knowledge generation. While both the biodiversity and the omics research communities have recognized the urgent need for (meta)data standards, they each have historically developed and adopted their own standards, making collaboration and data integration challenging.
To address the pressing need for interoperability between biodiversity and omics (meta)data standards, the Task Group (TG) for Sustainable DwC-MIxS Interoperability was formed. Its primary mission is to bridge the gap between the (meta)data standards of two distinct organizations, the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG)’s Darwin Core (DwC) standard and the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC)’s Minimum Information about any (x) Sequence (MIxS) checklist, providing a sustainable framework for data integration.
The Task Group assembled a team of experts to build semantically precise and sustained interoperability between TDWG’s DwC standard, and the MIxS checklist from the GSC.
This collaborative effort culminated in a methods paper, in which they report on building sustainable interoperability between DwC and MIxS. The paper was published in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal, as part of a special collection, supported by the EU-funded project BiCIKL (Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library), and looking to demonstrate the advantages and novel approaches in accessing and (re-)using linked biodiversity data.
“With representatives from established biodiversity data infrastructures, domain experts, data generators, and publishers, we - ab initio - bridged the conceptual to the application space,” write the task group members in their paper.
To ensure the sustainability and lasting impact of this initiative, TDWG and GSC have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on creating a continuous model to synchronize their standards.
“We trust that the activities of this TG will inspire similar activities between other metadata standards in this space, to break down silos and open a path to a more collaborative and interoperable future,” they say in conclusion.
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Original source:
Meyer R, Appeltans W, Duncan WD, Dimitrova M, Gan Y-M, Stjernegaard Jeppesen T, Mungall C, Paul DL, Provoost P, Robertson T, Schriml L, Suominen S, Walls R, Sweetlove M, Ung V, Van de Putte A, Wallis E, Wieczorek J, Buttigieg PL (2023) Aligning Standards Communities for Omics Biodiversity Data: Sustainable Darwin Core-MIxS Interoperability. Biodiversity Data Journal 11: e112420. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.11.e112420
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You can find all contributions published in the “Linking FAIR biodiversity data through publications: The BiCIKL approach” article collection in the open-access, peer-reviewed Biodiversity Data Journal on: https://doi.org/10.3897/bdj.coll.209.
JOURNAL
Biodiversity Data Journal
ARTICLE TITLE
Aligning Standards Communities for Omics Biodiversity Data: Sustainable Darwin Core-MIxS Interoperability
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
3-Oct-2023
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