Abstract
Mining is an important human activity, but it strongly alters terrestrial and aquatic landscapes. Understanding the response of community-level descriptors is essential to plan monitoring and management strategies. In this context, we investigated differences in the environmental conditions and ichthyofauna (taxonomic and functional) structure in five pristine and four disturbed streams in a Central Amazon protected area sampled in the dry season of 2012. Additionally, we analyzed if taxonomic and functional structure exhibited similar spatial variation patterns among streams. Pristine streams exhibited higher richness and proportion of catfishes (Siluriformes) than disturbed streams, but no differences in the functional structure. The taxonomic and functional structure of the fish assemblages in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest varied concomitantly among the streams. Our results indicate that taxonomic-based metrics were more sensitive to the mining impacts in the Saracá-Taquera National Forest, probably because of the high functional redundancy of the local assemblages. We highlight the sensitivity of richness and proportion of siluriformes for monitoring stream fish assemblages in the Central Amazon.
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Data availability
Data and R scripts are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5177164).
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Data and R scripts are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5177164).
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Acknowledgments
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) supported this research through the project “Ecological studies in the low-order streams in the National Forest Saracá-Taquera (PA),” headed by Francisco de Assis Esteves and Reinaldo Luiz Bozelli. The authors are grateful to the other participants of the monitoring that helped with fieldwork and curation of biological samples. We are grateful to the National Council for Scientific and Technologial Development (CNPq) for the fellowship provided to FBT (306912/2018-0) and NCSS (141343/2015-0), and to the Foundation Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) for the postdoctoral fellowship provided to BES (process number E-26/200.758/2019).
Funding
Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) supported this research through the project “Ecological studies in the low order streams in the National Forest Saracá-Taquera (PA).” FBT and NCSS received fellowships from CNPq, and BES received a fellowship from FAPERJ.
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NCSS, FBT, EPC, and MPA conceived and designed the study; NCSS and BES conceived and performed data analysis and curated the dataset; NCSS and BES wrote the original draft of the paper; FBT, EPC, and MPA critically reviewed the paper; EPC conducted funding acquisition, project administration, and resource provisioning; FBT, EPC, and MPA supervised the project and paper writing.
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Silva, N.C.S., Soares, B.E., Teresa, F.B. et al. Fish functional diversity is less impacted by mining than fish taxonomic richness in an Amazonian stream system. Aquat Ecol 56, 815–827 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-022-09946-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-022-09946-w