Maria Teresa Ferreira

University of Lisbon | UL · Forest Research Center (CEF)

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...

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...

Longitudinal connectivity in rivers is very important for freshwater fish, especially considering Diadromous species since it is determinant for life cycle completion. Large dams impose a serious fragmentation on river networks and affect diadromous species occurrence. This work aims to assess the structural and functional longitudinal connectivity...

The relevance of riparian areas to improve nature condition and human well-being is widely acknowledged. These are also important in intensive agricultural landscapes to mitigate effects caused by farming intensification, negatively affecting nature and “nature´s contributions to people” (NCP). However, current EU agricultural policies (eg, CAP) ne...

Comprising 25% of vertebrates and 40% of all fish diversity, freshwater fish species are among the most threatened animal groups. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is the most comprehensive system for evaluating species risk of extinction and provides information on the species’ populations, di...

Riverine areas are considered large carbon reserves because they support long-term woody communities, which in their natural state are dense and diverse. In this study, we analysed the carbon storage alterations across 20.5 km of riverine Sampling Units (SUs) downstream Touvedo (a run-of-river dam) and Fronhas (a storage reservoir), by adopting a L...

Freshwater ecosystems are disproportionally important for biodiversity conservation, as they support more than 9% of known animal species while representing less than 1% of the Earth’s surface. However, the vast majority of the threats (99%, or 826 out of 837) identified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened S...

The connectivity of riparian forests can be used as a proxy for the capacity of riparian zones to provide ecological functions, goods and services. In this study, we aim to test the potential of the freely available Copernicus “Riparian Zones” dataset to characterize the connectivity of riparian forests located in two European bioclimatic regions—t...

In this study, we assess the potential of ants as bioindicators of riparian ecological health in two river types (upland and lowland type) located in the Catalonian region. We proposed to understand to what extent do metrics based on ant responses provide useful information that cannot be presented by traditional biophysical assessments while attem...

The threat posed by invasive non-native species worldwide requires a global approach to identify which introduced species are likely to pose an elevated risk of impact to native species and ecosystems. To inform policy, stakeholders and management decisions on global threats to aquatic ecosystems, 195 assessors representing 120 risk assessment area...

This dataset contains the results of explanatory variables extracted from sampling points located in the Ecological Infrastructure (EI) patches and in the surrounding matrix of the areas that were established under the Optimal greening of irrigated farmland to achieve a prime environment and biodiversity project (Optimus Prime project – PTDC/ASP-AG...

This dataset contains the results of 171 explanatory variables computed for 359 sampling points located in the matrix area and the Riparian Ecological Infrastructure (EI) patches of four study areas located in three distinct landscapes of the Tagus and Sorraia rivers floodplains (Portugal). Variable types include: i) point variables, pertaining to...

This study aims to complement existing fish-based assessment approaches by classifying European lampreys and fish species according to their probability of occurrence in six different longitudinal river regions and five types of floodplain water bodies under unimpaired conditions. The main objective was to provide for the first time harmonized occu...