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A freshwater ecoregion delineation approach based on freshwater macroinvertebrate community features and spatial environmental data in Taizi River Basin, northeastern China

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Ecological Research

Abstract

The ecoregion is currently widely used as the basic geospatial unit in freshwater biodiversity conservation. The popularly used delineation is usually based on the assumption that attributes of aquatic ecosystems are influenced by landscape-scale environmental variables. However, few ecoregion delineations attempt to establish the local validity of this assumption prior to delineation, and few studies check the correspondence of the derived ecoregion boundaries with the distributions of attributes of aquatic biota. In this study, we established an approach to overcome these shortcomings. The notable features of the approach are: (1) the delineation variables were filtered through a series of analytical steps to select those that best represented the aquatic community traits, and which avoided redundancy in the data; (2) the method was quantitative and repeatable; and (3) the derived ecoregion boundaries were checked for consistency with the spatial attributes of aquatic biota. The approach was applied in the Taizi River Basin, northeast China. The procedure proposed here filtered out altitude and annual precipitation as the best variables to include in the freshwater ecoregion delineation. Then, using the quantitative ISODATA classification method, the basin was classified into three ecoregions. A test of accuracy indicated that freshwater ecoregions matched well with the spatial distribution pattern of macroinvertebrate community attributes. Statistical analysis showed that natural geographical attributes and river attributes were different in the three ecoregions, and indices representing macroinvertebrate community attributes are significantly different as a whole among the three ecoregions. The case study proved this approach effective on ecoregion delineation.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the “Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment in China” (Grant No. 2008ZX07526-001, 2012ZX07501-001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Riverine Ecological Conservation and Technology, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing, 100012, China

    Weijing Kong, Wei Meng, Yuan Zhang & Xiaodong Qu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, 8 Dayangfang, Beiyuan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100012, China

    Weijing Kong, Wei Meng, Yuan Zhang & Xiaodong Qu

  3. Melbourne School of Land and Environment, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Christopher Gippel

  4. Fluvial Systems Pty Ltd, Stockton, NSW, 2295, Australia

    Christopher Gippel

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  1. Weijing Kong
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  2. Wei Meng
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  3. Yuan Zhang
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  4. Christopher Gippel
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  5. Xiaodong Qu
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Correspondence to Yuan Zhang.

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Kong, W., Meng, W., Zhang, Y. et al. A freshwater ecoregion delineation approach based on freshwater macroinvertebrate community features and spatial environmental data in Taizi River Basin, northeastern China. Ecol Res 28, 581–592 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-013-1048-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11284-013-1048-7

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