
Maria Teresa FerreiraUniversity of Lisbon | UL · Forest Research Center (CEF)
Maria Teresa Ferreira
PhD Forest & Natural Resources
About
710
Publications
180,154
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Introduction
Research activities are centered in applied issues related to freshwater ecosystems management. Research subjects included biological distribution patterns and their drivers, with emphasis on human activities; ecological quality evaluation and monitoring; dynamics of aquatic vegetation and wetland woods; ecohydraulics of fish passes and obstacles; fish habitat requirements and environmental flows; effects of flow regulation and connectivity losses; ecology of exotic species; river restoration.
Additional affiliations
January 1983 - present
Publications
Publications (710)
Freshwater habitats and biota are among the most threatened worldwide. In Europe, significant efforts are being taken to counteract detrimental human impacts on nature. In line with these efforts, the MERLIN project funded by the H2020 program focuses on mainstreaming ecosystem restoration for freshwater-related environments at the landscape scale....
This project deliverable presents the presence maps, in European river basins, of 673 native freshwater-dependent fish species (resident and obligatory migrants, represented by the classes Actinopterygii and Petromyzontidae). The Ural and Caucasus Mountains were defined as the geographical boundaries for Europe, including Turkey (delimited on the s...
Difficulties have hampered bioassessment in southern European rivers due to limited reference data and the unclear impact of multiple interacting stressors on plant communities. Predictive modelling may help overcome this limitation by aggregating different pressures affecting aquatic organisms and showing the most influential factors. We assembled...
River fragmentation by instream barriers obstructs the movements of organisms, reducing the amount of available habitat for native fishes. However, instream barriers can also block the spread of non-native invasive ones. This study aimed to assess the selectivity of a small instream barrier, a steep (120%) low-head ramp, for successful movements of...
For this review paper:
Vadas, R.L. Jr., and 26 coauthors. 2022. Assemblage-based biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystem health via multimetric indices: a critical review and suggestions for improving their applicability. Water Biology and Security [online] 1(3): 100054 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772735122000737).
Hydropower plants, particularly storage power plants operated on demand, cause rapid and frequent fluctuations in discharge (hydropeaking) that threaten river ecosystems, especially fish larvae and juveniles. To date, hydropeaking research has primarily focused on salmonids, while the early life stages of cyprinids have been largely neglected. This...
Background
The urgent need for conservation efforts in response to the global biodiversity crisis is exemplified by initiatives, such as the EU LIFE BEETLES project. This project aims to preserve endangered arthropod species that are crucial for ecosystem functionality, with a focus on endemic beetle species in Flores, Pico and Terceira Islands (Az...
Exposure to synthetic chemicals, such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals, affects freshwater communities at broad spatial scales. This risk is commonly managed in a prospective environmental risk assessment (ERA). Relying on generic methods, a few standard test organisms, and safety factors to account for uncertainty, ERA determines concentrations t...
Land use and land cover (LULC) changes alter the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems, impacting the potential and flow of ecosystem services. Ecological restoration projects aiming to enhance native vegetation have proven effective in mitigating the impacts of LULC changes on ecosystem services. A key element in implementing these proje...
Globally, there is a concerning decline in many insect populations, and this trend likely extends to all arthropods, potentially impacting unique island biota. Native non-endemic and endemic species on islands are under threat due to habitat destruction, with the introduction of exotic, and potentially invasive, species, further contributing to thi...
The EU Nature Restoration Law represents an important opportunity for freshwater habitat restoration and, consequently, freshwater biodiversity protection. However, a number of challenges must be anticipated in its implementation, which may compromise its success. Some aspects, particularly those relating to freshwater ecosystems, require more clar...
The Azorean archipelago, recognized as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, is home to a diverse and unique community of arthropod species, highlighting a notable degree of endemism. However, the native forests that support these species are facing significant degradation due to habitat loss and fragmentation. In this study, we aimed to determ...
River artificial fragmentation is arguably the most imperilling threat for freshwater-
dependent fish species. Fish need to be able to freely move along river networks as not only spawning
grounds but also refuge and feeding areas may be spatially and temporally separated. This incapacity
of free displacement may result in genetic depletion of some...
Somewhat modified from my local article (as inspiration for Hughes et al. 2023):
Vadas, R.L. Jr. 2009. (Letter supporting) AFS resolution. The Fishing Line (Trout Unlimited, Olympia Chapter, Olympia, WA) 218: 6-8 (formerly online, WA-BC Chapter of the American Fisheries Society).
Increasingly, scientists and non-scientists, especially employees of government agencies, tend to use weak or equivocal language when making statements related to science policy and governmental regulation. We use recent publications to provide examples of vague language versus examples of strong language when authors write about regulating anthrop...
Temporary rivers are widespread in the Mediterranean region and impose a challenge for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and other environmental regulations. Surprisingly, an overarching analysis of their ecological status and the stressors affecting them is yet missing. We compiled data on the ecological status of 1504 temp...
Island ecosystems are experiencing a significant decline in biodiversity, with forest biodiversity being particularly affected by several biodiversity erosion drivers. This alarming situation highlights the urgent need for conservation managers to develop more accurate and efficient tools to assess and monitor the quality status of sites. To addres...
Advances in ecological research during the last decades have led to an improved understanding of the impacts of alien species. Despite that, the effects of alien macrofungi have often received little attention and are still poorly understood. With the aim of reducing this knowledge gap, we compiled a database of the recorded socio-economic and envi...
Ecological Infrastructures (EIs) form a network of natural and semi-natural areas crucial to support biodiversity in human-altered landscapes. Several indices have been proposed to assess the ecological quality of EIs, but these have been seldom tested using animal biodiversity as a response variable. The Habitat Ecological Infrastructure's Diversi...
Typology systems are frequently used in applied and fundamental ecology and are relevant for environmental monitoring and conservation. They aggregate ecosystems into discrete types based on biotic and abiotic variables, assuming that ecosystems of the same type are more alike than ecosystems of different types with regard to a specific property of...
Globally, freshwater habitats are home to 9.5% of all animal species, being disproportionally relevant when considering the earth’s surface occupied. These ecosystems have also been crucial for human societal development since prehistoric times, which translates into being impacted by a multitude of anthropogenic pressures and effects throughout ti...
In Europe, rivers and wetlands are heavily impacted, thus it is critical to work towards restoration. The MERLIN project aims to “identify landscapes with high potential and priority for transformative restoration, particularly focusing on essential ecosystem services, biodiversity targets, and climate change mitigation”. To support this, river uni...
Fish represent a quarter of all vertebrates and 40% of those are freshwater-related species, the second most threatened animal group. These species are, at least for a significant part of their life cycle, limited to occur in rivers, i.e., hierarchic and dendritic networks where flow imposes a directionality. Data collected from the International U...
Unlabelled:
Research on how intermittent water releases from hydropower plants affect the early life stages of fish has advanced in the last years, focusing not only on the direct impacts of rapid flow changes (hydropeaking), but also on the short-term fluctuations in water temperature (thermopeaking). Flow and thermal fluctuations caused by hydro...
Typology systems are frequently used in applied and fundamental ecology and are relevant for environmental monitoring and conservation. They aggregate ecosystems into discrete types based on biotic and abiotic variables, assuming that ecosystems of the same type are more alike than ecosystems of different types with regard to a specific property of...
A long-term study monitoring arthropods (Arthropoda) is being conducted since 2012 in the forests of Azorean Islands. Named "SLAM - Long Term Ecological Study of the Impacts of Climate Change in the natural forest of Azores", this project aims to understand the impact of biodiversity erosion drivers in the distribution, abundance and diversity of A...
The Riparian Ecological Infrastructure (REI) is defined by the ensemble of natural and semi-natural woody and herbaceous vegetation patches located contiguously to water courses. Freshwater environments and the associated REI provide habitat for many species, acting as corridors linking landscapes at a wider scale.
Focusing on ants, a ubiquitous an...
We aimed at assessing the role of ecological infrastructures (EI) in promoting ant biodiversity in floodplain Mediterranean agricultural crops. We examined and compared ant communities at the interface between EI (remnant vegetation patches) and adjoining agricultural matrix (maize, rice, others) in irrigated farmland. The study was conducted in 20...
Freshwater biota are more comprehensive and direct indicators of biological impacts, and more meaningful to the public than water quality or physical habitat surrogates. Freshwater biotic data and the multiple biological indicators developed from them offer a much richer array of data for assessing the impacts of pollution controls than a limited s...
Aim
To uncover the biogeography of non‐native macrofungal diversity worldwide, by analysing patterns and drivers of (1) regional variation in species richness, (2) compositional similarity between regional species assemblages and (3) the spatiotemporal trends of first records.
Location
Global.
Methods
We used a database providing 1608 distributio...
Rivers have always been closely related with society development wich has resulted in a a high degree of human induced impacts
forced upon freshwaters. Among all the pressures, river network fragmentation by artificial barriers is considered one of the
most damaging, especially for freshwater fish species that see their longitudinal movements impar...
River systems represent ca. 1% of the Earth’s surface, and are disproportionally important for biodiversity maintenance, as they
maintain a high number of species. Furthermore, these systems provide a multitude of ecosystem services on which society is
dependent. Because of this dependence, rivers have long been affected by anthropogenic pressures,...
Freshwater fish species are the second most threatened animal group while the richest among European vertebrates. The
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List contains information on species’ populations, distribution, ecology
and threats, setting the foundation for a comprehensive evaluation of species extinction risk. Using...
Dammed Fish is a research project that aims to evaluate and propose solutions and tools to inform river network connectivity
management to improve fish biodiversity and to enhance biotic quality of European rivers. For this purpose, river network
connectivity management needs guidance to choose the best available solutions within a frame of ongoing...
Environmental, ecosystem functioning and human activities must be considered at multiple river scales for an effective research, conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems. The ability to integrate, at multiple scales, an ever-growing plethora of information of this nature into a hierarchical dendritic and directional network, such as riv...
Longitudinal connectivity of freshwater systems can be disrupted by natural or artificial barriers. In addition to limiting fish
migration, barriers can also affect habitat quality by creating changes in flow regime, sediment and nutrient transport, and
water temperature. Most of the research on river network fragmentation lacks the distinction bet...
Intensive agricultural and industrial activities are often considered major sources of water contamination. Currently, riparian vegetation (RV) is increasingly being promoted as a solution to balance the potentially adverse effects that agriculture may have on water quality. Nonetheless, existing RV is often overlook in recent modelling efforts, fa...
Ecological infrastructures (EI), defined as natural or semi-natural structural elements, are important to support biodiversity and could play a crucial role in counteracting the well-known impacts of intensive agriculture. Yet, the importance of EI remains largely unexplored in Mediterranean agricultural landscapes and for species providing essenti...
Freshwater fish species comprise 40% of all fish diversity and provide multiple ecosystem ser-vices. Recently, several populations of this faunal group have faced declines and range contrac-tions due to several threats. The Red List of Threatened Species, established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is the most comprehe...
Historical information on diadromous fish species is commonly incomplete or truncated across species distribution range and spatial scales. However, historical insights have proven to be very relevant for river management and conservation. The iPODfish is a new methodological framework that enables the inference of a more thorough representation of...
Effective research, conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems must take into con-sideration the environment, ecosystem functioning and human activities at multiple river scales. The river Network toolkit (RivTool) is a user-friendly and freely available software of universal applicability that enables the integration of these multiple in...
Special Session: Ecohydraulics 2021: Novel methods to investigate flow-biota interactions numerically, in the lab and in the field Abstract Rivers are affected by a vast number of artificial barriers that block fish movements within river networks, preventing several freshwater dependent fish species from completing their life cycle. Fish need to b...
Humans have severely altered freshwater ecosystems globally, causing a loss of biodiversity. Regulatory frameworks, like the Water Framework Directive, have been developed to support actions that halt and reverse this loss. These frameworks use typology systems that summarize freshwater ecosystems into environmentally delineated types. Within types...
The Riparian Ecological Infrastructure is a network of natural and/or semi-natural riparian patches, vital to support
biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (ES) in human-dominated landscapes. In this study, we evaluated the habitat
quality of REI patches and their potential for the provision of ES. Fieldwork was carried out in the riparian and
flood...
Ecological infrastructures (EIs) are considered relevant components in agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services. We used the predatory attacks on lepidopteran dummies as a proxy to assess predation rates in the agricultural matrix and different EIs types according to their location and vegetation structure. We aimed at...
Available information on diadromous fish species historical occurrences is generally biased and incomplete across species distribution range and spatial scales. This work aims to establish a new methodological framework (iPODfish – Inferring Past Occurrences of Diadromous Fish) to obtain a more complete representation of the historical occurrences...
Rivers are experiencing increasing anthropogenic pressures and salinity has shown to affect freshwater fish behaviour, potentially disrupting ecological processes. In this study, the aim was to determine the sub-lethal effects of salinization on freshwater fish behaviour, using a widespread native cyprinid species, the Iberian barbel (Luciobarbus b...
Citation: Segurado, P.; Ferreira, T.; Branco, P. Assessing the Effects of Multiple Stressors on Aquatic Systems across Temporal and Spatial Scales: From Measurement to Management. Water 2021, 13, 3549.
Climate change represents a major challenge for the management of native fish communities in Mediterranean rivers, as reductions in discharge may lead to a decrease in passability through small barriers such as weirs, both in temporary and perennial rivers. Through hydraulic modelling, we investigated how discharges from a large hydropower plant in...
The systematic literature review discusses several approaches that have been developed to improve the identification of barriers for connectivity enhancement.
Riparian Ecological Infrastructures are networks of natural and semi-natural riparian areas located in human-dominated landscapes, crucial in supporting processes that directly or indirectly benefit humans or enhance social welfare. In this study, we developed a novel multimetric index, termed Habitat Ecological Infrastructure’s Diversity Index (HE...