Author(s): Joeselle Serrana; Sakiko Yaegashi; Shunsuke Kondoh; Bin Li; Christopher Robinson; Kozo Watanabe
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Abstract: Previous studies monitoring the ecological effects of sediment bypass tunnels (SBTs) operation on downstream reaches suggest a positive influence of SBTs on the recovery of riverbed condition and macroinvertebrate community through traditional morphology-based surveys. However, morphology-based macroinvertebrate assessments are costly, time-consuming and the large number of morphologically cryptic, small-sized and undescribed species results to a coarse taxonomic level of identification. In this study, we utilized DNA metabarcoding analysis to assess the influence of SBT operation on macroinvertebrate communities by estimating species diversity and pairwise community dissimilarity in dam-fragmented rivers with operational SBTs in comparison to dam-fragmented (i. e., without SBT) and free-flowing rivers (i. e., without dam). We report that macroinvertebrate community dissimilarity decreases with increasing operation time and frequency of SBT. These could be major factors influencing the recovery of riverbed features that would subsequently support the recovery of the downstream macroinvertebrate community similar or close to the upstream community.
Year: 2018