@article{Dobson:2022:10.1101/2022.03.31.486513,
author = {Dobson, B and Barry, S and Maes-Prior, R and Mijic, A and Woodward, G and Pearse, WD},
doi = {10.1101/2022.03.31.486513},
title = {Predicting catchment suitability for biodiversity at national scales},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.31.486513},
year = {2022}
}

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TY  - JOUR
AB  - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Biomonitoring of water quality and catchment management are often disconnected, due to mismatching scales. Great effort and money is spent each year on routine reach-scale surveying across many sites, particularly in the UK, and typically with a focus on pre-defined indicators of organic pollution to compare observed vs expected subsets of common macroinvertebrate indicator species. Threatened species are often ignored due to their rarity as are many invasive species, which are seen as undesirable even though they are increasingly common in freshwaters, especially in urban ecosystems. However, these taxa are monitored separately for reasons related to biodiversity concerns rather than for gauging water quality. Repurposing such monitoring data could therefore provide important new biomonitoring tools that can help catchment managers to directly link the water quality that they aim to control with the biodiversity that they are trying to protect. Here we used the England Non-Native and Rare/Protected species records that track these two groups of species as a proof-of-concept for linking catchment scale management of freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity to a range of potential drivers across England. We used national land use (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology land cover map) and water quality indicator (Environment Agency water quality data archive) datasets to predict the presence or absence of 48 focal threatened or invasive species of concern routinely sampled by the English Environment Agency at catchment scale, with a median accuracy of 0.81 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. A variety of water quality indicators and land-use types were useful in predictions, highlighting that future biomonitoring schemes could use such complementary measures to capture a wider spectrum of drivers and responses. In particular, the percentage of a catchment covered by freshwater was the single most
AU  - Dobson,B
AU  - Barry,S
AU  - Maes-Prior,R
AU  - Mijic,A
AU  - Woodward,G
AU  - Pearse,WD
DO  - 10.1101/2022.03.31.486513
PY  - 2022///
TI  - Predicting catchment suitability for biodiversity at national scales
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.31.486513
ER  - 

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