Rafael Muñoz-Mas

Grupo Tragsatec

Capsule An accumulated rainfall of around 100 mm favoured the productivity of the specialist Moustached Warbler Acrocephalus melanopogon, but temperature had a negative effect. By contrast, temperature had a positive effect on the productivity of the generalist Reed Warbler Acrocephalus scirpaceus, whereas rainfall had almost no effect, although pr...

We investigated the relationship between benthic macroinvertebrate community attributes (richness, abundance, biodiversity, and climate-specific and resistance forms) and the physical characteristics of distinct mesohabitats (hydromorphological unit types) discretized into fast (e.g., riffles or rapids) and slow (e.g., pools or glides) flow types i...

Damming and flow regulation ensure water availability during dearth periods, but they cause impacts on inhabiting biota and facilitate the establishment of Invasive Alien Species (IAS). Setting environmental flows (e-flows) has proven fundamental to ensure good ecological status of rivers, battle IAS, and sustain ecosystem services. However, ongoin...

Nesting events of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) are on the rise in the Western Mediterranean Sea, far from their usual nesting areas in the Mediterranean and Atlantic basins. The study of dispersal behavior toward potential developmental areas of loggerhead post-hatchlings from this new nesting area is crucial to comprehend this coloniza...

Aim Investigating major freshwater fish flows (translocations) between biogeographic regions and their temporal dynamics and also quantifying spatial patterns and temporal changes in the array of introduced species, and the emergence and distance between major donor and recipient regions. Location Global. Time Period 1800–2020. Major Taxa Studie...

Loggerhead sea turtle ( Caretta caretta ) nesting events are increasing in the western Mediterranean Sea, far from their usual nesting areas in the Mediterranean and Atlantic basins. The study of dispersal behaviour towards potential developmental areas of loggerhead post-hatchlings from this new nesting area is crucial to comprehend this colonizat...

The population of West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) is declining rapidly mostly due to the impact of human activities and habitat loss. Sierra Leone harbors the third largest population of this subspecies, recently reclassified as Critically Endangered in the 2016 IUCN Red List. Population monitoring provides crucial data for plannin...

Bisphenol A (BPA) is one of the main ubiquitous compounds released from plastics in the environment. This compound, considered an endocrine disruptor, poses a risk to aquatic wildlife and human population, being included in multiple environmental monitoring programmes. Following the regulations restricting BPA use in the last years, BPA-like chemic...

Scientific and grey literature on invasive alien species (IAS) is conditioned by social, economic and political priorities, editorial preferences and species and ecosystem characteristics. This leads to knowledge gaps and mismatches between scientific research interests and management needs. We reviewed the literature on IAS management in Spain fou...

Los estudios que analizan los cambios en las comunidades de aves suelen estar enfocados en fenómenos de corta duración, como son las variaciones en ciclos anuales o cambios producidos a raíz de modificaciones del hábitat. Hay pocos trabajos que analicen la estructura de la comunidad a medio-largo plazo, siendo especialmente escasos los estudios sob...

The modification of sediment and flow regimes caused by damming and river regulation has deleterious effects on the ecological and morphological river processes. This alteration of river systems triggered the implementation of safeguarding environmental flows (e-flows) defined as “the quantity, timing, and quality of water flows required to sustain...

Only 38% of the United Nations' member countries have established legal frameworks to facilitate the implementation of environmental flows. Only 14% of the world’s longest rivers is hydrologically protected by regularly receiving environmental flows. We review global historical-political developments in environmental flows management, the environme...

Mapping the streambed morphology is crucial for understanding fluvial forms and processes, for advancing both our knowledge and best management practice of riverine systems. It is often done by wading streams but recently topobathymetric Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and imagery captured from airborne platforms are becoming promising and effe...

River systems are characterized by the existence of longitudinal processes structuring fish assemblages. However, the construction of dams, many of them built in cascades, are disrupting these processes worldwide. Here, we analyzed the fish assemblages across reservoir cascades in three Brazilian river basins (Iguaçu, Paranapanema, and São Francisc...

Flow regime governs the structure of lotic ecosystems, both through formative events (i.e. floods and droughts) but also during ordinary flows when flow regulates the habitat availability. Consequently, changes in the frequency, magnitude, timing and duration of the different flows typically lead to remarkable changes on fish populations. Currently...

Streamflow and temperature regimes are key components of the physical habitats of instream biological communities. Iberian brown trout (Salmo trutta) populations exist in a climatic border where water scarcity and increasing water temperatures during summer could compromise their viability throughout the 21 st century. We predicted climate change-i...

In recent decades many studies have proven the paramount impact of flow regimes on the structure of lotic ecosystems, both through extreme events (i.e. floods and droughts) but also during intermediate flows, which temporarily and spatially regulate the habitat availability. Human demand for water is steadily increasing and scientists are challenge...

African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis Matschie, 1900) are ecological engineers that play a fundamental role in vegetation dynamics. The species is of immediate conservation concern, yet it is relatively understudied. To narrow this knowledge gap, we studied the drivers of daily movement patterns (linear displacements) of forest elephants—cha...

To satisfy agricultural demands and to sustain the ecological status are frequently conflicting objectives, especially in a context of climate (decline of resources) and land use change (abandonment of farmland and increase on irrigation). Furthermore, flow regulation has fostered the presence of invasive species owing to their better adaptation to...

Random Forests (RFs) and Gradient Boosting Machines (GBMs) are popular approaches for habitat suitability modelling in environmental flow assessment. However, both present some limitations theoretically solved by alternative tree-based ensemble techniques (e.g. conditional RFs or oblique RFs). Among them, eXtreme Gradient Boosting machines (XGBoost...

Spring-fed streams in Tokyo are important habitats for various aquatic species, whereas urbanization as well as introduction of invasive species is threatening the sustainability of such aquatic ecosystems. This study applies the System for Environmental Flow Analysis (SEFA) in a small urban river in Tokyo to assess the dynamics of the suitable hab...

Environmental flow assessment (EFA) involving microhabitat preference models is a common approach to set ecologically friendly flow regimes in territories with ongoing or planned projects to develop river basins, such as many rivers of Eastern Africa. However, habitat requirements of many African fish species are poorly studied, which may impair EF...

A fuzzy rule-based system combining empirical data on hydraulic preferences and literature information on temperature requirements was used to foresee the brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) spawning habitat degradation induced by climate change. The climatic scenarios for the Cabriel River (Eastern Iberian Peninsula) corresponded to two Representative C...

The expert-knowledge approach to develop fuzzy rule-based systems has been compared to three data-driven methods to model the microhabitat suitability for tree size classes of brown trout (Salmo trutta L.). The simultaneous optimisation of the fuzzy sets, membership functions and fuzzy rules presented the best training cross-validation performance...

This research project analysed the multiobjective optimization of the environmental flow regime under several global and climate change scenarios in the Serpis River (Eastern Spain), considering trends in water demands, best habitat for native fish species and low overlap of habitat with invasive fish species. This project had the support of Fundac...

Flow-ecology relationships, in terms of ecological response functions, between indicators of hydrological alteration and the fish and macroinvertebrate communities were explored in the Jucar River Basin district (eastern Iberian Peninsula), within the conceptual framework of the Ecological Limits of Hydrological Alteration (ELOHA). These relationsh...

The influences of habitat structure and hydraulics on tropical macroinvertebrate communities were investigated in two foothill rivers of the Udzungwa Mountains (United Republic of Tanzania) to assist future Environmental Flow Assessments (EFAs). Macroinvertebrate samples, hydraulic variables and habitat structure were collected at the microhabitat...

It is essential to understand the patterning of biota and environmental influencing factors for proper rehabilitation and management at the river basin scale. The Hun-Tai River Basin was extensively sampled four times for macroinvertebrate community and environmental variables during one year. Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) were used to reveal the agg...

We propose the novel integrated modelling procedure 3H-EMC for the determination of the environmental flow in rivers and streams; 3H-EMC combines Hydrological, Hydrodynamic and Habitat modelling with the use of the Environmental Management Classes (EMCs) that are defined by the Global Environmental Flow Calculator. We apply 3H-EMC in the Sperchios...

Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are flexible classification techniques suited to render trustworthy species distribution and habitat suitability models. Although several alternatives to improve PNNs' reliability and performance and/or to reduce computational costs exist, PNNs are currently not well recognised...

Supplement containing the detailed results from the simulations: expected relative seasonal changes in daily absolute precipitation (mm/day) and daily mean temperature (ºC) throughout the XXI century per meteorological station and each of the climate change studied scenarios, predicted daily mean air temperature; predicted daily mean streamflow, an...

Climate changes affect aquatic ecosystems by altering temperatures and precipitation patterns, and the rear edges of the distributions of cold-water species are especially sensitive to these effects. The main goal of this study was to predict in detail how changes in air temperature and precipitation will affect streamflow, the thermal habitat of a...

Climate change and river regulation are negatively impacting riparian vegetation. To evaluate these impacts, process-based models are preferred over data-driven approaches. However, they require extensive knowledge about ecohydrological processes. To facilitate the implementation of such process-based models, the key drivers of riparian woodland su...

Climate change affects aquatic ecosystems altering temperature and precipitation patterns, and the rear edge of the distribution of cold-water species is especially sensitive to them. The main goal was to predict in detail how change in air temperature and precipitation will affect streamflow, the thermal habitat of a cold-water fish (brown trout,...

Competition with invasive species is recognized as having a major impact on biodiversity conservation. The upper part of the Cabriel River (Eastern Iberian Peninsula) harbours the most important population of the Júcar nase (Parachondrostoma arrigonis; Steindachner, 1866), a fish species in imminent danger of extinction. Currently, this species coh...

The impacts of invasive species are recognised as a major threat to global freshwater biodiversity. The risk of invasion (probability of presence) of two avowed invasive species, the northern pike (Esox Lucius, L.) and bleak (Alburnus alburnus, L.), was evaluated in the upper part of the Cabriel River (eastern Iberian Peninsula). Habitat suitabilit...

Inconsistent performance of Species Distribution Models (SDMs), which may depend on several factors such as the initial conditions or the applied modelling technique, is one of the greatest challenges in ecological modelling. To overcome this problem, ensemble modelling combines the forecasts of several individual models. A commonly applied ensembl...

The invasion of freshwater ecosystems is a particularly alarming phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula. Habitat suitability modelling is a proficient approach to extract knowledge about species ecology and to guide adequate management actions. Decision-trees are an interpretable modelling technique widely used in ecology, able to handle strongly nonl...

During the last two decades, studies of brown trout habitat selection have been conducted across the Iberian Peninsula. The subsequent habitat suitability (probability of presence) models allowed the application of the physical habitat simulation (or habitat evaluation), which is commonly a fundamental step in environmental flow assessment. However...

The invasion of freshwater ecosystems is a particularly alarming phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula. Habitat suitability modelling is a proficient approach to extract knowledge about species ecology and to guide adequate management actions. Decision-trees are an interpretable modelling technique widely used in ecology, able to handle strongly nonl...

Streamflow and temperature regimes are well-known to influence on the availability of suitable physical habitat for instream biological communities. General Circulation Models (GCMs) have predicted significant changes in timing and geographic distribution of precipitation and atmospheric temperature for the ongoing century. However, differences in...

Habitat suitability models (HSM) are concerned with the abundance or distribution of species as a consequence of interactions with the physical environment. Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) were used to model brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) density as a function of environmental variables at the scale of river reach and hydromorphological units (HM...

The impact of climate change on the habitat suitability for large brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) was studied in a segment of the Cabriel River (Iberian Peninsula). The future flow and water temperature patterns were simulated at a daily time step with M5 models' trees (NSE of 0.78 and 0.97 respectively) for two short-term scenarios (2011-2040) under...

This study is aimed at forecasting the changes in the suitability of brown trout habitat (Salmo trutta L.), caused by alterations in the stream temperature and the flow regime under climate change scenarios. The stream temperature and instantaneous flow in several streams in Central Spain were modelled from daily temperature and precipitation data....

The physical habitat simulation plays an important role in environmental flow assessments, being integrated in different methodological frameworks. Some of these methodologies present analysis at different scales, but the applications of mesoscale habitat simulation are not very extended. Some of the difficulties for their global application are th...

The impact of climate change in the suitable habitat available for the large brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) was studied in a segment of the Cabriel River (eastern Iberian Peninsula) by coupling a Témez rainfall-runoff model calibrated for the 1960-2000 period (NSE: 0.72), a River-2D hydraulic model and an ensemble of five machine learning techniques...

The physical habitat simulation sub-routine of the Instream Flow Incremental Methodology (IFIM) uses hydraulic modeling and suitability indices of target fish species to predict how differences in-stream flows affect the microhabitat occupation by fish species. This habitat modelling approach was adopted to assess the ecological effects of running...

The ecological integrity of freshwater lotic ecosystems depends on the flow regime which has a pronounced natural variability in the natural Mediterranean streams. The increasing human demands for water resources has led to the adoption of the environmental flow concept which focuses on an integrated management of water for long-term sustainability...

Esta investigación, enmarcada en el proyecto ECOFLOW (Grecia), está enfocada a la estimación de caudales ecológicos en ríos de Grecia. La alteración hidrológica y la degradación de los hábitats fluviales han sido escasamente estudiados en este país, y permanecen aún fuera de su legislación. En este trabajo se aplicó el enfoque de la simulación del...

El método de simulación del hábitat físico, integrado en el marco de la metodología IFIM (Instream Flow Incremental Methodology) y en otros marcos metodológicos hoy día, utiliza variables hidráulicas e índices de idoneidad del hábitat (a escala de microhábitat) para predecir los cambios potenciales del hábitat al cambiar el caudal circulante. Este...

The use of accurate habitat suitability curves is one of the most limitation for the correct use of habitat simulation methodologies in the determination of environmental flows, due to the existence of various potential sources of error in the development of said curves. For the purposes of this comunication, the habitat suitability curves applied...

Interspecific competition is recognised as a major impact to biodiversity conservation. The upper part of the Cabriel River harbours the most important population of Júcar nase, a fish species in imminent danger of extinction; nowadays this species cohabits with several non-native species such as the Iberian nase and the bermejuela. The potential h...

Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) have been tested for the first time in microhabitat suitability modelling for adult brown trout (Salmo trutta L.). The impact of data prevalence on PNN was studied. The PNN were evaluated in an independent river and the applicability of PNN to assess the environmental flow was analysed. Prevalence did not affect...

The aim of this study is to apply a state-of-the-art methodology for the estimation of environmental flows by predicting how different in-stream flows affect fish microhabitats. A habitat modelling approach was adopted to simulate and assess the ecological effects of physical aquatic habitat changes in Greek upland rivers downstream of water abstra...

The freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera) is endangered throughout its entire range. In the North Tyne catchment, North-East England, the pearl mussel population was estimated at approximately 26,000 individuals in 2006 but shows no evidence of recruitment. Habitat availability and use curves were constructed using data on substrate...

Occasionally, Species Distribution Models (SDM) do not perform equally even providing discrepant predictions depending on several factors such as the initial conditions or the applied modelling technique. To cope with these discrepancies, ensemble modelling combines the forecasts provided by several individual models. The Multilayer Perceptron (MLP...

The prediction of fish presence related to habitat characteristics is fundamental for the definition of environmental flows and habitat restoration measures. Meso-scale habitat models have been widely used in the context of water resources planning and management and demonstrated interesting potentials to assess freshwater fish distribution at a la...

The implementation of the Water Framework Directive implies the determination of an environmental flow (E-flow) in each running water body. In Spain, many of the minimum flow assessments were determined with the physical habitat simulation system based on univariate habitat suitability curves. Multivariate habitat suitability models, widely applied...

Habitat degradation has reduced the complexity of the Mediterranean streams in Spain and contributed to decreasing the historical range of the endangered Júcar nase, Parachondrostoma arrigonis. This species is endemic to the Júcar River Basin (Spain), and most of its populations live in the Cabriel River, which is divided into two segments by the l...

Physical processes in rivers are the result of the interaction between flow regime and hydraulics, morphology, sedimentology and sediment transport. The frequency and magnitude of physical disturbance (i.e. bed stability) control habitat integrity and, consequently, ecological diversity of a particular fluvial system. Most rivers experience human-...

In the European context, several methodologies have been developed to assess the ecological status and, specifically, the hydromorphological status of running surface waters. Although these methodologies have been widely used, few studies have focused on hydrologically altered water bodies and the factors that may determine their status. In this st...

The most widely used statistical methods to predict species richness and identify complex environmental relationships have been based on linear principles, due to its easy use and interpretation. However, these techniques are not efficient to link environmental variables because ecological interactions are generally nonlinear. Artificial neural net...

The spatial distribution of the main riparian woody species in two natural sites was studied in two Mediterranean rivers (Cabriel and Mijares) of the Júcar River Basin District. Five hydrological variables were considered (inundation duration, inundation duration during the growth period, continuous inundation duration, inundation frequency and pla...

The presence of large dams affects habitat availability, often regarded as the primary factor that limits population and community recovery in rivers. Physical habitat is often targeted in restoration, but there is often a paucity of useful information. Habitat degradation has reduced the complexity and connectivity of the Mediterranean streams in...