Jani Heino

University of Oulu · Department of Geography

Owing to a long history of anthropogenic pressures, freshwater ecosystems are among the most vulnerable to biodiversity loss¹. Mitigation measures, including wastewater treatment and hydromorphological restoration, have aimed to improve environmental quality and foster the recovery of freshwater biodiversity². Here, using 1,816 time series of fresh...

Aim A key aspect of biodiversity research is to determine the environmental drivers affecting the degree to which ecological assemblages vary in space (beta diversity). The strength and significance of environmental drivers of beta diversity is, however, influenced by the spatial extent over which beta diversity is assessed. Beta diversity of river...

Freshwater ecosystems harbour a disproportionately high biodiversity relative to their area, being also one of the most threatened ecosystem types worldwide. However, our capacity to design evidence-based conservation plans for this realm is restricted by all biodiversity shortfalls that have been recognized so far. In this context, the paucity of...

1. Changes in natural land cover have been pronounced in the last 12,000 years, and land use has intensified in the last century owing to anthropogenic pressures on landscapes. This trend has led to concomitant changes in the abiotic templates and biotic communities of different ecosystems embedded in a landscape. 2. Deciphering the role of land us...

Resilience research is central to confront the sustainability challenges to ecosystems and human societies in a rapidly changing world. Given that social-ecological problems span entire Earth system, there is a critical need for resilience models that account for the connectivity across intricately linked ecosystems (i.e., freshwater, marine, terre...

Biotic homogenisation is defined as decreasing dissimilarity among ecological assemblages sampled within a given spatial area over time. Biotic differentiation, in turn, is defined as increasing dissimilarity over time. Overall, changes in the spatial dissimilarities among assemblages (termed 'beta diversity') is an increasingly recognised feature...

A growing body of evidence has shown that biological invasions cause shifts in species composition of communities in space and time. Although biological invasions are considered a major driver of biotic homogenisation worldwide, most previous studies were conducted at small spatial scales and over short time periods, which may have underestimated t...

Unravelling patterns and mechanisms of biogeographical transitions is crucial if we are to understand compositional gradients at large spatial extents, but no studies have thus far examined breakpoints in community composition of freshwater plants across continents. Using a dataset of almost 500 observations of lake plant community composition from...

Human land‐use change is a major threat to natural ecosystems worldwide. Nonetheless, the effects of human land‐uses on the structure of plant and animal assemblages and their functional characteristics need to be better understood. Furthermore, the pathways by which human land uses affect ecosystem functions, such as biomass production, still need...

Context Urbanization-induced environmental changes are key causes of community disassembly in freshwater systems. Given that species’ traits are closely linked to environmental tolerances, trait-based approaches allow predicting ecological community responses to urbanization. These responses are typically mediated by a suite of traits of organisms...

Aim: Understanding the mechanisms underlying the structure and connectivity of ecological communities is a central issue in biogeography. Dispersal syndromes are tightly woven into organisms' life history seen across populations and communities, but measuring dispersal is still complicated in practice. We investigated the role of dispersal syndrome...

Revealing how aquatic organisms respond to dam impacts is essential for river biomonitoring and management. Traditional examinations of dam impacts on macroinvertebrate assemblages were frequently conducted within single rivers (i.e., between upstream vs. downstream locations) and based on taxonomic identities but have rarely been expanded to level...

Motivation Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater biodiversity in macr...

Aim Disentangling how stochastic and deterministic processes contribute to variation in beta diversity is a common goal for ecologists and biogeographers. However, such studies are scarce in alpine streams, especially when different diversity facets are considered. Here, we combined different approaches to examine the drivers of taxonomic, phylogen...

Motivation: Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are

Motivation: Aquatic insects comprise 64% of freshwater animal diversity and are widely used as bioindicators to assess water quality impairment and freshwater ecosystem health, as well as to test ecological hypotheses. Despite their importance, a comprehensive, global database of aquatic insect occurrences for mapping freshwater biodiversity in mac...

It has long been debated why groups such as non-avian dinosaurs became extinct whereas mammals and other lineages survived the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction 66 million years ago. We used Markov networks, ecological niche partitioning, and Earth System models to reconstruct North American food webs and simulate ecospace occupancy before and a...

Understanding the patterns and ecological determinants of β diversity in freshwater ecosystems is fundamental to biogeography, conservation biology, and environmental management. It has been proposed that β diversity can be divided into contributions of individual sites (LCBD) or species (SCBD) to total β diversity. However, the patterns and underl...

The lack of high‐resolution distribution maps for freshwater species across large scales fundamentally challenges biodiversity conservation worldwide. Here, we propose a simple framework to delineate the distributions of freshwater fishes in a high‐resolution drainage map using stacked species distribution models and expert‐based information. Apply...

Understanding the capacity of ecological systems to withstand and recover from disturbances is a major challenge for ecological research in the context of environmental changes. Past research has mostly focused on the local effects of disturbances on biodiversity recovery, while alterations of inter-patch connectivity induced by disturbances have r...

Aim The interspecific relationships between species occupancy and abundance have been broadly studied in terrestrial systems; however, the causes underlying this relationship in freshwater fishes remain poorly addressed. The main aims of this study were (a) to examine the occupancy–abundance relationship in 62 fish species in a monsoon climate rive...

Lateral hydrological connectivity (LHC) is a key process in maintaining aquatic biodiversity in river floodplain ecosystems. However, the effects of LHC loss on aquatic biodiversity are rarely studied. Here, we evaluated, for the first time, the responses of multiple facets (i.e., taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic) of alpha and beta diversity...

Urbanization is one of the major drivers of biotic homogenization (i.e., decrease in beta diversity) in freshwater systems. However, only a few studies have simultaneously examined how urbanization affects multiple facets (i. e., taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic) of beta diversity and its underlying ecological drivers in urban river macroinve...

Many studies have shown that biodiversity regulates a multitude of ecological functions that are needed to maintain the productivity and efficiency of a variety of types of ecosystems. What is not known is how human activities may change the ‘multifunctionality’ of ecosystems as they have both direct impacts on ecosystems and indirect effects on th...

We examined the functional strategies and the trait space of 596 European taxa of freshwater macroinvertebrates characterized by 63 fuzzy coded traits belonging to 11 trait groups. Principal component analysis was used to reduce trait dimensionality, to explain ecological strategies, and to quantify the trait space occupied by taxa. Null models wer...

Geodiversity is an emerging, multi-faceted concept in Earth and environmental sciences. Knowledge on geo-diversity is crucial for understanding functions of natural systems and in guiding sustainable development. Despite the critical nature of geodiversity information, data acquisition and analytical methods have lagged behind the conceptual develo...

Aim We propose a novel approach that considers taxonomic uniqueness, functional uniqueness and environmental uniqueness and show how it can be used in guiding conservation planning. We illustrate the approach using data for lake biota and environment. Location Lake Puruvesi, Finland. Methods We sampled macrophytes and macroinvertebrates from the...

An intensively debated issue in ecology is whether the variations in the biodiversity patterns of different biological groups are congruent in space and time. In addition, ecologists have recognized the necessity of accounting for both taxonomic and functional facets when analysing spatial and temporal congruence patterns. This study aimed to deter...

Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance...

Context A core theme in ecohydrology is understanding how hydrology affects spatial variation in the composition of species assemblages (i.e., beta diversity). However, most empirical evidence is from research in upland rivers spanning small spatial extents. Relatively little is known of the consequences of hydrological variation for beta diversity...

Globalization has led to the introduction of thousands of alien species worldwide. With growing impacts by invasive species, understanding the invasion process remains critical for predicting adverse effects and informing efficient management. Theoretically, invasion dynamics have been assumed to follow an “invasion curve” (S-shaped curve of availa...

The accelerated eutrophication of freshwater lakes has become an environmental problem worldwide. Increasing numbers of studies highlight the need to incorporate functional and phylogenetic information of species into bioassessment programms, but it is still poorly understood how eutrophication affects multiple diversity facets of freshwater commun...

1. Freshwater ecosystems and their biota are more seriously threatened than their marine and terrestrial counterparts. A solution to halt increasing negative impacts of anthropogenic development would be to reconsider the basics of nature conservation (i.e. protection of pristine and near-pristine areas) and restoration (i.e. returning an impacted...

To improve our understanding on the temporal aspects of metacommunity structure, we focused on benthic macroinvertebrates collected seasonally (i.e., wet, drying, dry and rewetting seasons) in Dongting Lake, a large subtropical floodplain lake in China. We employed the elements of metacommunity structure (EMS) framework and variation partitioning t...

The cover image is based on the Viewpoint A global agenda for advancing freshwater biodiversity research by Alain Maasri et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13931. Image Credit: Solvin Zankl. image

Conversion of forests to urban land-use in the processes of urbanization is one of the major causes of biotic homogenization (i.e., decline in beta diversity) in freshwater ecosystems, threating ecosystem functioning and services. However, empirical studies exploring urban land-use shaping patterns of taxonomic and functional beta diversities and t...

Understanding the capacity of ecological systems to withstand and recover from disturbances is a major challenge for ecological research in the context of environmental change. Disturbances have multi-scale effects: they can cause species extinctions locally and alter connectivity between habitat patches at the metacommunity level. Yet, our underst...

Aim: Disentangling the drivers of community assembly and species diversity in space and time is critical to elucidating metacommunity theory. However, our understanding of how metacommunity structuring will change over time remains insufficient, especially in rivers in the monsoon climate zone. We examined whether 1) the idealized metacommunity str...

River networks are among Earth’s most threatened hot-spots of biodiversity and provide key ecosystem services (e.g., supply drinking water and food, climate regulation) essential to sustaining human well-being. Climate change and increased human water use are causing more rivers and streams to dry, with devastating impacts on biodiversity and ecosy...

Effects of dam operation and extraction of water from rivers on spatial variation in hydrological regimes, and consequences for freshwater biodiversity, are widely predicted but seldom assessed empirically. Evidence of linkages between hydrology and beta diversity contributes to water-management decisions to support landscape-scale biodiversity and...

Global freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and meeting the challenges of this crisis requires bold goals and the mobilisation of substantial resources. While the reasons are varied, investments in both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind those in the terrestrial and marine realms. Inspired by a global...

The negative impact of urbanization on biodiversity can be buffered by blue (e.g., rivers, ponds) and green (e.g., parks, forests) spaces. However, to prevent biodiversity loss and reduce the risk of local extinctions, blue and green spaces need to be connected by corridors, so that organisms may disperse between sites. Landscape connectivity affec...

We evaluated the beta diversity patterns of aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages at two spatial scales in streams in the Eastern Amazon, as well as tested whether environmental and spatial factors affected these assemblage patterns differently for non-flying (i.e., shrimps) and flying (i.e., insects) macroinvertebrate groups. Fifteen streams were...

Regional‐scale ecological processes, such as the spatial flows of material, energy, and organisms, are fundamental for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in river networks. Yet these processes remain largely overlooked in most river management practices and underlying policies. Here, we propose adoption of a meta‐system approach, wh...

Inland aquatic ecosystems, such as streams, rivers, ponds and lakes, play an important role in maintaining global aquatic biodiversity and ecosystem services. They have been increasingly influenced by environmental change such as global warming, dam construction, habitat fragmentation, eutrophication and urbanization. However, our understanding of...

An understanding of the consequences of human-mediated disturbances from multi-facet diversity (i.e. species, functional and phylogenetic) perspectives is of great significance in biodiversity assessment and conservation planning. Most previous studies have concentrated on anthropogenic effects on species diversity in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) i...

Iron (Fe) is an important element in aquatic ecosystems worldwide because it is intimately tied with multiple abiotic and biotic phenomena. Here, we give a survey of manifold influences of Fe, and the key factors affecting it in the boreal catchments and their waters. It includes the perspectives of biogeochemistry, hydrology, ecology, and river ba...

Body size descriptors and associated resemblance measurements may provide useful tools for forecasting ecological responses to increasing anthropogenic land‒use disturbances. Yet, the influences of agriculture and urbanisation on the size structure of biotic assemblages have seldom been investigated in running waters. Using a comprehensive dataset...

Eutrophication is a major problem currently impacting many surface water ecosystems. Impacts of increased nutrient concentrations on biodiversity may differ between different scales, different organism groups, and different trophic states. Surveys at different spatial scales have suggested that biodiversity of different taxa may exhibit significant...

Deterministic and stochastic processes are two major factors shaping community dynamics, but their relative importance remains unknown for many aquatic systems, including those in the high‐elevation Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Here, we explored the causes of multidimensional beta diversity patterns (i.e., taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic) of a ma...

We evaluated the beta diversity patterns of aquatic macroinvertebrate assemblages at two spatial scales in streams in the Eastern Amazon, as well as tested whether environmental and spatial factors affected these assemblage patterns differently for non-flying (i.e., shrimps) and flying (i.e., insects ) macroinvertebrate groups. Fifteen streams were...

There have been important advances in understanding the relative importance of environmental and spatial processes for the variation in species composition across a set of local communities linked by dispersal (i.e. metacommunities). However, community composition-environment relationships change over time, and the mechanisms shaping such temporal...

Ecological processes occurring at the regional scale, such as the dispersal of organisms, and spatial flows of material and energy are fundamental for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in river networks, yet they remain largely overlooked in most river management practices and underlying policies. We propose a meta-system approach...

Aim To test the importance of evolutionary and biogeographical processes in shaping the assembly of local frog communities in two adjacent regions (hereafter, coastal and inland regions) with different historical signatures. We asked two main questions: (1) why does the coastal region harbour more frog species than the inland region? and (2) how do...

Ecological communities are structured by several mechanisms, including temporal, spatial and environmental factors. However, the simultaneous effects of these factors have rarely been studied. Here, we investigated their role on water beetle assemblages sampled over a period of 18 years. Water beetles were sampled in the spring of each year in loti...

A multi-faceted approach is needed to better understand how the beta diversity of aquatic assemblages responds to ecological gradients. Using distance-based RDA and variance partitioning, we explored the different components of total beta diversity (replacement and richness difference) based on taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic data of aquati...

Metacommunity ecology highlights the importance of integrating simultaneously environmental filtering and spatial processes, such as mass effects and dispersal limitation, into investigation of community assembly. However, few studies to date have tried to examine mass effects and dispersal limitation as independent ecological mechanisms along with...