Sandra Brucet

University of Vic | UVIC · Biosciences

This publication brings together 16 leaflets (in English and in local Languages) developed for the DEMO-sites of the EU H2020 PONDERFUL project (2020-2024). These summary “leaflet” cover each of the 16 demonstration pondscapes located across various EU countries, as well as Turkey and Uruguay. The main objective of the DEMO-SITES leaflets is to (i...

The construction of riverine structures (weirs, bridges, or channelization) on riverbeds causes alterations in the flow regime and channel geometry. Once a new stretch is created, species must colonize it. The ecological succession processes that are entailed are decisive for adequate recovery after alterations, and understanding these processes wo...

Body size is a master trait in aquatic ecosystems to complement traditional taxonomic diversity measures. Based on a dataset of fish communities from 40 Turkish lakes covering a wide environmental gradient and continental to dry cold steppe to Mediterranean climates, we elucidated the key variables controlling size diversity, geometric mean length...

Aim The maintenance of broad‐scale connectivity patterns is suggested as a sustainable strategy for biodiversity preservation. However, explicit approaches for quantifying the functional role of different areas in biogeographic connectivity have been elusive. Freshwaters are spatially structured ecosystems critically endangered because of human act...

Ponds and “pondscapes” (networks of ponds) are crucial habitats for biodiversity and for delivering multiple benefits to humans, so-called “Nature’s Contribution to People”, such as climate mitigation and adaptation to climate change, creation, and maintenance of habitat for biodiversity, water purification, flood mitigation and cultural benefits (...

The structure and functioning of Arctic ecosystems have been drastically modified by global warming, with fish species potentially performing habitat shifts such as the northern expansion of generalist and warm-adapted species. The freshwater fish species Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus, hereafter charr) plays a key role in Arctic lake food webs,...

An organism's body size plays an important role in ecological interactions such as predator-prey relationships. As predators are typically larger than their prey, this often leads to a strong positive relationship between body size and trophic position in aquatic ecosystems. The distribution of body sizes in a community can thus be an indicator of...

The role of sea birds as carriers of pollutants over long distances was evaluated by analyzing organochlorine and organobromine compounds in lake sediment cores from three remote sites around the North Water polynya (North West Greenland). One lake, NOW5, was in the vicinity of a little auk (Alle alle L.) bird colony, whereas the other two lakes, N...

The widespread salinisation of freshwater ecosystems poses a major threat to the biodiversity, functioning, and services that they provide. Human activities promote freshwater salinisation through multiple drivers (e.g., agriculture, resource extraction, urbanisation) that are amplified by climate change. Due to its complexity, we are still far fro...

The structure and functioning of Arctic ecosystems have been drastically modified by global warming, with fish species potentially performing habitat shifts such as the northern expansion of generalist and warm-adapted species. The freshwater fish species Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus, hereafter charr) plays a key role in Arctic lake food webs,...

The Andalusian International University held a workshop entitled Temporary wetlands’ future in drylands under the projected global change scenario in March 2020 in Baeza, Spain, with 26 participants from 10 countries. The workshop objectives were to promote international cooperation and scientific exchange on the conservation and protection of temp...

Aquatic ecosystems are strongly body-size structured with a decline of numerical abundance with increasing body size (hereafter, the size spectrum).Marine and lake fish studies have reported consistent variations of size spectra in relation to environmental conditions and biotic composition, but little is known about streamfishes. Accordingly, in t...

Trophic interactions in the pelagic area of lakes and the opposing effects of fish feeding (top-down) and phytoplankton biomass (bottom-up) on zooplankton communities are central topics in limnology. We hypothesized that zooplankton size distributions should be a more sensitive approach to disentangle top-down and bottom-up effects than the commonl...

Aim: We tested whether there is a strong effect of species interactions on assembly of local lake fish communities, in addition to environmental filters and dispersal. Location: Seven hundred and seventy-two European lakes and reservoirs. Time period: 1993-2012. Major taxa studied: Nineteen species of freshwater fishes. Methods: We applied a laten...

In arid and semiarid regions, extreme temperature events and the frequency and duration of drought will increase toward 2050, leading to increased salinisation of inland waters, aggravated by catchment erosion and human activities (e.g., crop irrigation). With salinisation, a decline in biodiversity is expected, with potential negative effects on f...

Aphanius iberus is an endemic cyprinodontoid fish species of Mediterranean ponds in danger of extinction. In this study, we studied some abiotic and biotic factors that can influence A. iberus’s size structure and density in Mediterranean brackish ponds. We sampled fish using fyke nets in 10 ponds of Empordà (Spain) during the spring season. Our re...

Climate warming threatens the structure and function of shallow lakes, not least those in the Mediterranean climate. We used a space-for-time substitution approach to assess the response of trophic and community structures as well as the richness and evenness of multiple trophic levels to temperature, hydrological, and nutrient constraints. We sele...

Fish community feeding and production rates may differ between lakes despite similar fish biomass levels because of differences in size structure and local temperature. Therefore, across-lake comparisons of the strength and direction of top-down and bottom-up fish–phytoplankton relationships should consider these factors. We used the metabolic theo...

We summarize the scientific knowledge about lake fish communities with respect to taxonomic and functional diversity, to patterns of abundance and biomass, and to size structure. The majority of studies have been conducted in temperate areas of the Palearctic and Nearctic, but we added more scarcely available data about fish communities from Arctic...

Planktivorous fish predation directly affects zooplankton biomass, community and size structure, and may indirectly induce a trophic cascade to phytoplankton. However, it is not clear how quickly the zooplankton community structure and the cascading effects on phytoplankton recover to the unaffected state (i.e. resilience) once short-term predation...

This review is part of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report on Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and provides a critical assessment of issues facing decision-makers, including freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem trends as well as drivers of change. Freshwater systems are well established...

In this study, performed in Mediterranean brackish ponds during spring season, we assessed the effects of biotic interactions and abiotic factors on the size and taxonomic structure of the phytoplankton and zooplankton. We used a taxonomic and a size diversity index as a descriptor of the community structure. We predicted that the size diversity of...

Visconti, P., Elias, V., Sousa Pinto, I., Fischer, M., Ali-Zade, V., Báldi, A., Brucet, S., Bukvareva, E., Byrne, K., Caplat, P., Feest, A., Guerra, C., Gozlan, R., Jelić, D., Kikvidze, Z., Lavrillier, A., Le Roux, X., Lipka, O., Petrík, P., Schatz, B., Smelansky, I. and Viard, F. (2018): Chapter 3: Status, trends and future dynamics of biodiversit...

The European Water Framework Directive requires the integration of body size characters as an important part of fish-based bioassessment tools for freshwaters ecological status determination. The study of the entire fish community size-structure provides valuable information about food web capacity, food web stability and ecological efficiency of a...

Fish can alter food web structure through trophic cascades. While most studies conducted in oligotrophic subarctic lakes show strong top–down control on consumers in the presence of fish, several studies undertaken in eutrophic subarctic Lake Mývatn, Iceland, suggest that it is consumer–resource interactions that drive the whole-lake community. Her...

Size structure of organisms at logarithmic scale (i.e. size spectrum) can often be described by a linear function with a negative slope; however, substantial deviations from linearity have often been found in natural systems. Theoretical studies suggest that greater nonlinearity in community size spectrum is associated with high predator–prey size...

The density of organisms declines with size, because larger organisms need more energy than smaller ones and energetic losses occur when larger organisms feed on smaller ones. A potential expression of density‐size distributions are Normalized Biomass Size Spectra (NBSS), which plot the logarithm of biomass independent of taxonomy within bins of lo...

Invasion of non-native species is considered a major threat to global biodiversity. Here we present a comprehensive overview of the occurrence, richness and biomass contribution of non-native fish species in 1943 standing water bodies from 14 countries of the Western Palearctic, based on standardised fish catches by multi-mesh gillnetting. We expec...

Trochine et al. 2018 (Ecosystems) ESM

1. Trophic cascade studies have so far mostly focused on changes in the abundance, biomass, or average size of prey and predators. In contrast, individual size-based interactions, playing a key role in the trophic structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems, have been less explored. 2. We conducted a 3-month in situ experiment in Lake Myvatn, I...

Body size is a key trait of an organism which determines the dynamics of predator–prey interactions. Most empirical studies on the individual size distribution of the aquatic community have focused on the variations in body size of a single trophic level as a response to certain environmental variables or biotic factors. Few studies, however, have...

Body size, coupled with abundance and taxonomy, may help to understand the mechanisms shaping community structure. Since the body size of fish is closely related to their trophic niche, size diversity (based on individual body size) of fish communities may capture intraspecific variations in fish trophic niches that are not detected by species dive...

The ongoing global climate change involves not only increased temperatures but may also produce more frequent extreme events, such as severe rainfall that could trigger a pulse of nutrients to lakes. In shallow lakes, this may affect primary producers through a number of direct and indirect mechanisms. We conducted a six-month mesocosm experiment t...

Lentic ecosystems act as sentinels of climate change, and evidence exists that their sensitivity to warming varies along a latitudinal gradient. We assessed the effects of nutrient and water level variability on zooplankton community composition, taxonomic diversity and size structure in different climate zones by running a standardised controlled...

Shallow lakes may play an important role for the nitrogen (N) balance in drainage basins by processing, transferring and retaining N inputs. An increase in the frequency of storm‐induced short‐term N pulses and increased water temperatures are both likely outcomes of climate change, potentially affecting the N processing in lakes. An experiment wit...

Effects of fish predation on consumers tend to be particularly strong in oligotrophic Arctic and sub-Arctic lakes. However, it remains unclear whether the fish influence the trophic structure and dynamics of naturally eutrophic lakes in these cold environments with simple food web structures. To study this, we conducted a 3-month in situ-controlled...

Here we provide the metadata for an overview on fish species presence/absence in 1943 Palearctic (Europe + Turkey) lakes and reservoirs. The data have been obtained by standardized multi-mesh gillnet fishing, primarily to fulfill the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). The species list encompasses about 100 species, a few...

In spite of being a widespread activity causing the salinization of rivers worldwide, the impact of potash mining on river ecosystems is poorly understood. Here we used a mesocosm approach to test the effects of a salt effluent coming from a potash mine on algal and aquatic invertebrate communities at different concentrations and release modes (i.e...

Nutrient fluctuations and climate warming can synergistically affect trophic dynamics in lakes, resulting in enhanced symptoms of eutrophication, thereby potentially counteracting restoration measures. We performed a long-term study (23 years) of zooplankton in Danish Lake Søbygaard, which is in recovery after nutrient loading reduction, but now fa...

A method for the measurement of the size diversity based on the classical Shannon–Wiener expression was proposed as a proxy of the shape of the size distribution. The summatory of probabilities of a discrete variable (such as species relative abundances) in the original Shannon–Wiener expression was substituted by an integral of the probability den...

We conducted a fish survey in 40 lakes in western and central Turkey. Fifty species (one to eleven per lake) were recorded, including eighteen endemic and seven alien species. We investigated which local geo-climatic and other environmental variables shaped the fish assemblages. Altitude and temperature turned out to be the most important factors f...

We studied fish size structure by using mean size, size diversity, and the slope of linear size spectra of six common European fish species along large-scale environmental gradients. We further analyzed the response of these three size metrics to environmental variables and to density-dependent effects, i.e., relative estimates of abundance (catch...

Transformation of the natural land cover is one of the most important global changes. Changes in land use may strongly affect ecosystem functions and biodiversity by directly or indirectly modifying key structural properties. Here, we examined the effects of land use on the size structure of fish communities in subtropical Uruguayan streams. We ana...

We conducted a fish survey in 40 lakes in western and central Turkey. Fifty species (one to eleven per lake) were recorded, including eighteen endemic and seven alien species. We investigated which local geo-climatic and other environmental variables shaped the fish assemblages. Altitude and temperature turned out to be the most important factors f...

Many human activities—like agriculture and resource extraction—are increasing the total concentration of dissolved inorganic salts (i.e., salinity) in freshwaters. Increasing salinity can have adverse effects on human health (1); increase the costs of water treatment for human consumption; and damage infrastructure [e.g., amounting to $700 million...

Planktivorous and benthivorous fish have been documented to influence the density and size structure of their prey communities in lakes. We hypothesized that piscivorous fish modify their prey fish communities in the same way and sought to find evidence for such predation effects from a comparison across 356 lakes located in nine European ecoregion...

Spatial patterns in the abundance of species are determined by local abiotic and biotic conditions, and by the movement of individuals among localities. For species distributed among discrete habitat ‘‘islands’’, such as zooplankton distributed among lakes, local conditions within lakes often dominate low movement rates among lakes to determine the...

In warm lakes, fish aggregate within macrophytes, thereby weakening the role of these as a daytime refuge for zooplankton and altering the zooplankton size structure, predation pressure and water clarity. To elucidate the role of macrophytes as a refuge for zooplankton and their effect on zooplankton size distribution, we established three sets of...

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in September 2014, unprecedented changes in temperature and precipitation patterns have been recorded globally in recent decades and further change is predicted to occur in the near future, mainly as the result of human activity. In particular, projections show that the Medi...

Large scale studies on individual size distribution of fish have primarily been done at community level, but little attention is paid at species level. We described fish size structure by using mean size, size diversity and the slope of linear size spectra of six common European fish species to compare whether these metrics responded to the same la...

Much information is available on community composition and abundance of submerged macrophytes in North temperate lakes, including their response to variation in environmental variables. Less is known about macrophytes in other climate regions. We studied 98 shallow lakes distributed in three different European latitudinal regions. The lakes were se...

In warm lakes, fish aggregate within macrophytes, thereby weakening the role of these as a daytime refuge for zooplankton and altering the zooplankton size structure, predation pressure, and water clarity. To elucidate the role of macrophytes as a refuge for zooplankton and their effect on zooplankton size distribution, we established three sets of...

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in September 2014, unprecedented changes in temperature and precipitation patterns have been recorded globally in recent decades and further change is predicted to occur in the near future, mainly as the result of human activity. In particular, projections show that the Medi...

Supplement to paper - Literature survey

Body size has been widely recognized as a key factor determining community structure in ecosystems. We analysed size diversity patterns of phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish assemblages in 13 data sets from freshwater and marine sites and found only weak relationships, indicating that predation and competition are not the only determinants of size...

Zooplankton community response to the combined effects of nutrients and fish (hereafter N-F) at contrasting temperatures was studied in a long-term experiment conducted in 24 shallow lake mesocosms with low and high nutrient levels. We found a positive effect of N-F on zooplankton biomass, chlorophyll-a and turbidity. In contrast, zooplankton speci...

Aim Our aim was to document geographical patterns of variation in the bodysize structure of European lake fish assemblages along abiotic gradients, and any differences in fish assemblage structure. We hypothesized that patterns in the body-size structure of entire lake fish assemblages are primarily temperature driven and consistent with the domina...

Freshwater ecosystems and their biodiversity are presently seriously threatened by global development and population growth, leading to increases in nutrient inputs and intensification of eutrophication-induced problems in receiving fresh waters, particularly in lakes. Climate change constitutes another threat exacerbating the symptoms of eutrophic...

Body size has been widely recognised as a key factor determining community structure in ecosystems. We analysed size diversity patterns of phytoplankton, zoo-plankton and fish assemblages in 13 data sets from freshwater and marine sites with the aim to assess whether there is a general trend in the effect of predation and resource competition on bo...

Variations in the size structure of fish communities were explored at European scale along gradients of climate, morphometry, productivity and fish community structure in more than 1800 lakes. Size metrics used were average fish body size, individual size distributions and size diversity. Analyses were conducted at both continental and regional sca...

Aim Our aim was to document geographical patterns of variation in the body‐size structure of European lake fish assemblages along abiotic gradients, and any differences in fish assemblage structure. We hypothesized that patterns in the body‐size structure of entire lake fish assemblages are primarily temperature driven and consistent with the domin...

The implementation of the W ater F ramework D irective requires EU member states to establish and harmonize ecological status class boundaries for biological quality elements. In this paper, we describe an approach for defining ecological class boundaries that delineates shifts in lake ecosystem functioning and, therefore, provides ecologically mea...

This report focuses on potential effects of climate change on ecological reference conditions and on ecological responses to nutrient pressures in lakes, especially threshold-type and non-linear responses. Reference conditions and thresholds responses are both fundamental for na-tional ecological classification systems according to the European Wat...

We assessed the vertical distribution and feeding of the calanoid copepod Metridia longa, in the Oslofjord, Norway during winter and spring 2006. Adult females of Metridia longa inhabited the whole 200 m deep water column. Their distribution was shallower at night than during the day. Enumeration of egested faecal pellets suggested that feeding act...