Present Activities and Projects
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______________________________________________________________________________________________________________- AMAZONFISH: Amazonian fishes and climate change
2016-2018. ERANet LAC (ELAC2014/DCC-0210). Coordinator: Thierry Oberdorff (IRD)
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The
project aimed to build a high quality freshwater fish biodiversity
database for the entire Amazon drainage basin. This will be done by
mobilizing and integrating information available in published articles,
books, gray literature, online databases, foreign and national museums
and universities and by checking for systematic reliability and
consistency for each species recorded. Sampling gaps will be identified
and field studies organized to fill, as far as possible, those gaps to
get the most up to date and comprehensive coverage available for
freshwater species distributions at the Amazon Basin scale. A
Geographic Information System (GIS) will be associated to the
biological database and all environmental factors meaningful in
explaining fish species distribution will be calculated over a 0.5° x
0.5° grid (i.e. environmental factors related to geographical
isolation, habitat diversity, contemporary climate). A basin wide
biogeographical analysis will be performed at the subbasin scale using
species richness, endemism and beta diversity descriptors. This will
allow defining degrees of irreplaceability and representativeness of
the different subbasins (i.e. “hotspots”). Future climate projections
will be further derived from the most commonly used ultimate GCMs and
consequent shifts in species range distribution and species extinctions
will be evaluated. The present project will generate a high quality
freshwater fish biodiversity database for the entire Amazon drainage
basin that will further serve as a basis for (1) analyzing future
trends in fish community patterns due to climate change, and (2) to
help developing regional conservation programs and contribute to
largescale transnational ecosystem management. No such data are
available at this time. Indeed although the Amazon basin concentrates
the highest freshwater biodiversity on earth, the knowledge on the
spatial distribution of these organisms is greatly deficient and large
taxonomic and sampling gaps prevent a comprehensive analysis and
modeling. Our project aims at filling these gaps, an essential need for
understanding this unique ecosystem that has produced such high
freshwater fish diversity.
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- The FISH CONNEXION: Impacts of fragmentation on freshwater fish communities in France
2016-2018. ONEMA project. Coordinator: Pablo A. Tedesco (IRD)
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freshwater environments, negative effects of fragmentation have been
demonstrated at large spatial scales. Through a reduction in population
size due to the reduction of available habitat or the reduction of
metapopulation connectivity, fragmentation increases the risk of
species extinction. But the extinction of a species may be the result
of a long process that can take hundreds or even thousands of years.
Under these conditions, it can be very difficult to detect significant
effects of fragmentation, especially as the potential impacts may
depend on several parameters and their interactions: the biology and
ecology of the species, their spatial distribution, permeability and
the spatial configuration of obstacles and climatic, environmental and habitat conditions.
This project intends to address these different factors to assess the
effects of fragmentation on species and fish communities of France. It
will initially assess the overall impact of fragmentation and then
identify the most problematic areas and obstacles and species and
populations most impacted. This will be achieved through the study of
several indicators of diversity (alpha, beta, taxonomic and
functional), dispersion and temporal dynamics of species at several
spatial scales. |  |
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- ICTIOPLATA: Icthyological georeferenced database of the La Plata drainage basin
This
project aims to build a site-scale georeferenced database on the
distribution of freshwater fish species from the La Plata drainage
basin in South America (regrouping the Parana, Paraguay and Uruguay
drainages) along with hydrological network layers of the basin. The
project involved researchers from the five concerned countries
(Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay). In a second step,
ICTIOPLATA will be accessible through a web interface offering row data
and analytical tools for biogeographic, macroecological and
conservation works. This "pilote" project is intended to be widened in
the future to all South American rivers.
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- GLOBAL FRESHWATER BIODIVERSITY ATLAS: The gateway to freshwater biodiversity maps
The
Global Freshwater Biodiversity Atlas is a collection of published and
open access freshwater biodiversity maps in addition to a gateway for
geographical information and spatial data at different scales. It
offers dynamic online maps accompanied by short articles with
background information. It also provides links to publications and data
sources related to freshwater biodiversity at the global, continental
and local scale. http://atlas.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/
We
encourage you to participate in adding to the Atlas and helping us to
make this vision a reality for the global freshwater biodiversity
community. If you can provide data or information for the Atlas please
visit our "Contribute" page.
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Past Activities & Projects |
- FISH LOSS:
Background, recent and anticipated patterns of freshwater fish
extinctions: devising quantitative approaches despite scarcity of
ecological information
2009-2013. ANR 6th Extinction 2009 (ANR-09-PEXT-008-01). Coordinator: Bernard Hugueny (IRD).
Probably
the most relevant international initiative with regard to the topics
emphasized by the “6th extinction” call for proposal is the “Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment” (MEA) launched in 2001 with a report published in
2005. Besides emphasizing the inter-relationships between biodiversity,
ecosystems services and human well-being, the MEA pioneered the use of
scenarios-based approaches to forecast human-driven populations and
species extinctions due to a reduction in habitat availability.
Irrespective of taxa and biomes the main drawback of the proposd
approaches (using species-area relationships) was that “Global and
local extinctions occur on a time scale that we cannot accurately
anticipate” (MEA 2005, p. 377). Another limitation was that these
approaches mainly dealt with terrestrial biomes, probably because many
of these are not readily transferable to analyses of aquatic diversity.
Syntheses
of recent losses of populations and species reported in the MEA suggest
that freshwater taxa are highly imperilled. However these conclusions
generally stem from well known taxa in a limited number of countries.
Fishes are no exception and most of the comprehensive regional
assessments of species conservation status have been made in temperate
regions. This is unfortunate as it prevents global evaluation of
biodiversity trend for freshwater fishes as requested, for instance, by
the “2010 Biodiversity Target” which requires by 2010 a significant
reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global,
regional and national level.
FISHLOSS
intends to fill the two gapes identified above in predicting and
assessing freshwater fish biodiversity. First to propose an approach
(extinction-area relationship) that cope explicitly with the time lag
associated with extinctions due to reduction in habitat availability.
Second to use available or readily available information (area of
occupancy, taxonomic/phylogenetic relatedness, ecomorphology) to
develop approaches that will help in providing a geographically more
balanced assessment of freshwater fish species vulnerability to
extinction.
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- EDIA International LAB: Evolution and Domestication of the Amazonian Ichtyofauna
2011-2015. IRD. Coordinator: Jean-François Renno (IRD)
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EDIA LMI aims to understand the evolutionary processes (speciation,
dispersal, extinction, adaptation) and the development of a predictive
approach to the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic
pressures on the biodiversity of fish species in the Amazon and its
peripheral regions (the Guyana shield, Orinoco, Magdalena, Andes,
Paraná - Paraguay). The program seeks to establish predictions of fish
communities changes facing global anthropogenic changes (species
richness and functional diversity loss, genetic erosion) and the
development of the biological bases for the development of sustainable
fish farming. |  |
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- BIOFRESH: Biodiversity of Freshwater Ecosystems: Status, Trends, Pressures and Conservation Priorities
2010-2013. European Project (FP7-ENV-2008-1). Coordinator: Clement Tockner
BioFresh
is an EU-funded international project that aims to build a global
information platform for scientists and ecosystem managers with access
to all available databases describing the distribution, status and
trends of global freshwater biodiversity. BioFresh integrates the
freshwater biodiversity competencies and expertise of 19 research
institutions. http://www.freshwaterbiodiversity.eu/
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- INVASIBILITY OF RIVERS: Ecological determinants of invasivility of rivers by invasive species
2009-2012. Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia (CGL2009-12877-C02-01/BOS). Coordinator: Emili Garcia-Berthou (UdG).
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- FRESHWATER FISH DIVERSITY:
Predictive models of taxonomic and functional diversity of freshwater
fish communities: tools to assess the effects of anthropisation and
climate change
2006-2010. ANR Biodiversité 2006 (ANR-06-BDIV-010). Coordinator: Thierry Oberdorff (IRD).
This
project uses freshwater fishes as a biological model group for an
integrated investigation of the ecological and evolutionary
determinants of biodiversity patterns, at global and regional scales. A
key aim is to investigate factors and understand the mechanisms that
underlie patterns of biodiversity. The “freshwater fish” model is
particularly well adapted to this type of study since rivers or lakes
are separated from one another by barriers (oceans, or land) that are
insurmountable for fish, and thus form kind of « biogeographic islands
» whose space is perfectly delimited. The absence of migration between
rivers or lakes over large temporal scales implies that extinction and
speciation processes are specific of each river (or lake) basin.
Incidentally, a considerable amount of exploitable data is now
potentially available (we will get, for the first time, biological and
environmental data on around 1000 river basins throughout the world)
that enables the elaboration of highly accurate fishes diversity maps
at the basin scale (which will serve for conservation purposes) and the
use of comparative approaches to test the main ecological hypotheses
currently under consideration. In order to do so, the project will
cover three themes that underpin species diversity, namely,
biogeography, environment, and life history and will allow the
development of a conceptual framework viewing contemporary fish
diversity as a product of a series of filters operating at different
spatial and temporal scales. This approach will permit to formulate
hypotheses concerning links between the observed structures and the
processes involved. This framework will be used to generate accurate
predictive models of fish diversity and to answer the questions that
are currently being asked by society (in both industrialized and
developing countries) including the spread of alien invasive species,
and the effects of global climate changes and natural habitats
fragmentation on the maintenance of this biodiversity.
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- ECOLOGICAL PLASTICITY OF MOSQUITOFISH: Invasive success and ecological plasticity of mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki)
2006-2009. Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia (CGL2006-11652-C02-01/BOS). Coordinator: Emili Garcia-Berthou (UdG).
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- The FADA PROJECT:
Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment Project. A global initiative
covering the whole range of freshwater taxa from nematods or bryozoans
to mammals and birds (Read more about FADA)
From 2005. The Belgian Biodiversity Platform. Coordinators: E.V. Balian, C. Lévêque, H. Segers & K. Martens.
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