Skip to content
DraconiticResearch
Search Sources API
197,768 studies31 sourcesUpdated 55 min ago
Peer-reviewedCC BY-NC-NDNature Communications

Biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer the destabilizing effects of anthropogenic activities on riverine fish communities

  • Fei Ma1
  • Hong Huang1
  • Qi Yang1
  • Florian Altermatt2,3
  • Pubin Hong1
  • Mingyu Luo4,1
  • Shaopeng Wang5
5 affiliations
  1. 1Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and State Key Laboratory of Vegetation Structure, Function and Construction (VegLab), Peking University, Beijing, China
  2. 2Department of Aquatic Ecology, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland
  3. 3Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
  4. 4Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  5. 5Institute of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and State Key Laboratory of Vegetation Structure, Function and Construction (VegLab), Peking University, Beijing, China. [email protected]
Open at sourceDOICite

Abstract

Riverine fish communities are essential for the functioning of aquatic ecosystems and provide important ecosystem services for fisheries. Yet, anthropogenic environmental changes pose threats to fish communities and result in population collapses and reduced yields, underscoring the need to understand their stability from local to regional scales. In this study, we leverage long-term observational data of riverine fish communities in 108 hydrological basins across the globe to determine how anthropogenic activity, biodiversity, and habitat complexity jointly influence riverine fish community stability (i.e., temporal invariability of total fish abundance) at the site and basin scales. Our analyses show that anthropogenic activities represented by human footprint index decrease fish community stability across spatial scales; however, biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer these destabilizing effects by providing insurance effects at both site and basin scales. Specifically, biodiversity has consistently stabilizing effects across scales through enhancing the asynchrony within and/or among fish communities. At the basin scale, greater habitat area increases gamma stability by enhancing spatial community asynchrony. Our findings underscore the importance of conserving both fish biodiversity and habitat complexity to sustain the stability of riverine fish communities in the Anthropocene.

Related

  1. Long-term biodiversity responses to anthropogenic change are spatially and taxonomically heterogeneous across coastal wetlands
    E. Banos, L. Holman, M. Rius +1
    bioRxivPreprintAll rights reservedFull textEcologybioRxiv
  2. Food web complexity underlies biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning
    Andrew D. Barnes, Ulrich Brose, Nico Eisenhauer +23
    NaturePeer-reviewedLicence not statedFull text5 citedEcologyOpenAlex
  3. Evenness and Taylor's law scaling shape biodiversity-stability relationships in subtropical estuarine communities
    H. L. Bleth, M. Fujiwara, M. Fisher +3
    bioRxivPreprintCC BY-NC-NDFull textEcologybioRxiv
  4. Exploring diversity of cultivable fungal communities in coastal sands and waters in south of France: impact of seasonality, and human activities.
    Frédéric Roger, Donika Krasteva, Virginie Bellet +6
    Journal of Medical Mycology = Journal de Mycologie MédicalePeer-reviewedCC BYPlant biologyHAL
  5. RASSF2 Under the Computational Microscope: Prediction of Destabilizing Missense Variants
    Laith Naser AL-Eitan, Mohammad Tareq Abusalem, Mansour Abdullah Alghamdi
    BiologyPeer-reviewedCC BYFull textGenetics & genomicsEurope PMCDOAJ

Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{ma2026biodiversity,
  title = {{Biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer the destabilizing effects of anthropogenic activities on riverine fish communities}},
  author = {Fei Ma and Hong Huang and Qi Yang and Florian Altermatt and Pubin Hong and Mingyu Luo and Shaopeng Wang},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  doi = {10.1038/s41467-026-73311-w},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73311-w},
  note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer the destabilizing effects of anthropogenic activities on riverine fish communities
AU  - Fei Ma
AU  - Hong Huang
AU  - Qi Yang
AU  - Florian Altermatt
AU  - Pubin Hong
AU  - Mingyu Luo
AU  - Shaopeng Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/18
JO  - Nature Communications
DO  - 10.1038/s41467-026-73311-w
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73311-w
AB  - Riverine fish communities are essential for the functioning of aquatic ecosystems and provide important ecosystem services for fisheries. Yet, anthropogenic environmental changes pose threats to fish communities and result in population collapses and reduced yields, underscoring the need to understand their stability from local to regional scales. In this study, we leverage long-term observational data of riverine fish communities in 108 hydrological basins across the globe to determine how anthropogenic activity, biodiversity, and habitat complexity jointly influence riverine fish community stability (i.e., temporal invariability of total fish abundance) at the site and basin scales. Our analyses show that anthropogenic activities represented by human footprint index decrease fish community stability across spatial scales; however, biodiversity and habitat complexity buffer these destabilizing effects by providing insurance effects at both site and basin scales. Specifically, biodiversity has consistently stabilizing effects across scales through enhancing the asynchrony within and/or among fish communities. At the basin scale, greater habitat area increases gamma stability by enhancing spatial community asynchrony. Our findings underscore the importance of conserving both fish biodiversity and habitat complexity to sustain the stability of riverine fish communities in the Anthropocene.
SN  - 2041-1723
ER  -