Yueming Qu

• Dr. rer. nat.
• UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Globally, fish have been severely affected by the widespread, chronic degradation of fresh waters, with a substantial proportion of species declining in abundance or range in recent decades. This has especially been the case in densely populated countries with an industrial heritage and intensive agriculture, where the majority of river catchments...

It is important to discover what change led to the improvement in European macroinvertebrate biodiversity in the period from 1990−2000s and what prevents further desirable gains from taking place today. A 30-year data set from 1,457 macroinvertebrate monitoring sites spread across England, with 65,032 discrete observations was combined with 41 chem...

Literature review reveals the importance of woodland for urban riverine macroinvertebrate. • Statistical analysis of selected urban rivers shows the influences of land cover and habitats. • The benefit of woodland for aquatic macroinvertebrate is stronger than pasture and cropland. • Bare ground, even in small amount, is detrimental to macroinverte...

Literature review reveals the importance of woodland for urban riverine macroinvertebrate. • Statistical analysis of selected urban rivers shows the influences of land cover and habitats. • The benefit of woodland for aquatic macroinvertebrate is stronger than pasture and cropland. • Bare ground, even in small amount, is detrimental to macroinverte...

Amongst a spectrum of benefits, Nature-based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly being advocated as improving the quality of aquatic environments in urban areas. Of these, a widely adopted measure is tree planting. Yet, because of the local complexities and spatial variability of urban hydrological response, it is difficult to predict to what extent i...

Riparian tree canopies are key components of river systems, and influence the provision of many essential ecosystem services. Their management provides the potential for substantial control of the downstream persistence of pollutants. The recent advent of new advances in mass spectrometry to detect a large suite of emerging contaminants, high-frequ...

There remains a persistent concern that freshwater biodiversity is in decline and being threatened by pollution. As the UK, and particularly England, is a densely populated nation with rivers of modest dilution capacity, this location is very suitable to examine how freshwater biodiversity has responded to human pressures over the past 30 years. A...

Systematic review of peer‐reviewed literature was undertaken to establish benefits of urban forests on reducing nutrient concentrations in adjacent or downstream waterbodies. Following screening, a small number of articles (40) were found relevant, representing studies quantifying non-point source nutrient losses from urban and peri-urban environme...

Given the many threats to freshwater biodiversity, we need to be able to resolve which of the multiple stressors present in rivers are most important in driving change. Phytoplankton are a key component of the aquatic ecosystem, their abundance, species richness and functional richness are important indicators of ecosystem health. In this study, sp...

Urban Green Infrastructure (GI) provides multiple benefits to city inhabitants and can be an important component in nature-based solutions (NBS), but the ecosystem services that underpin those benefits are inconsistently quantified in the literature. There remain substantial knowledge gaps about the level of service supported by less studied GI typ...

With the growing demand of assessing the ecological status, there is the need to fully understand the relationship between the planktic diversity and the environmental factors. Species richness and Shannon index have been widely used to describe the biodiversity of a community. Besides, we introduced the first ordination value from non-metric multi...

Water quality in lowland rivers is sensitive to changes in flow during summer dry periods, when high temperatures and low pollutant dilution are problematic and may reduce oxygen concentrations to levels of ecological concern. A 10-year period of monitoring data was collated for a typical small lowland UK river. Two hourly-resolution applications o...

Agrochemicals such as pesticides and nutrients are concurrent chemical stressors in freshwater aquatic ecosystems surrounded by agricultural areas. Lentic small water bodies (LSWB) are ecologically significant habitats especially for maintaining biodiversity but highly understudied. Phytoplankton are ideal indicator species for stress responses. Fu...

Background: Although the detection of SARS-CoV-2 viral load in respiratory specimens has been widely used to diagnose coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), it is undeniable that serum SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid (RNAaemia) could be detected in a fraction of COVID-19 patients. However, it is not clear whether testing for RNAaemia is correlated with the oc...

Background: Although the SARS-CoV-2 viral load detection of respiratory specimen has been widely used for novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) diagnosis, it is undeniable that serum SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid (RNAaemia) could be detected in a fraction of the COVID-19 patients. However, it is not clear that if the incidence of RNAaemia could be correla...

To understand the lowland riverine phytoplankton community (of species and functional groups), and to investigate the effects of abiotic factors on phytoplankton variance during the high-flow season, 59 sites of the Treene catchment, northern Germany, were visited in December 2014, where 327 species belonging to six taxonomic groups and 21 phytopla...

There has been increasing interest in algae‐based bioassessment, particularly, trait‐based approaches are increasingly suggested. However, the main drivers, especially the contribution of hydrological variables, of species composition, trait composition, and beta diversity of algae communities are less studied. To link species and trait composition...

The importance of phytoplankton-based bio-assessment has been recently recognized in lowland rivers which are affected by multi-environmental factors. However, some basic questions remain unclear to date, such as: (i) spatial and temporal variations of phytoplankton, (ii) the impact of upstream lakes on downstream community, (iii) the main drivers...

The toxicity of cyanotoxins on plant has been reported. However, in eutrophic waters harmful cyanobacteria are associated with other environmental pollutants, such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and metals. Information on the phytotoxicity and bioaccumulation of coexisted cyanotoxins and these environmental pollutants is still lacking. In...

The importance of phytoplankton-based bio-assessment has been recently recognized in lowland rivers which are affected by multi-environmental factors. However, some basic questions remain unclear to date, such as: (i) spatial and temporal variations of phytoplankton, (ii) the impact of upstream lakes on downstream community, (iii) the main drivers...

Algae based bio-assessments, particularly trait-based approaches, are increasingly used now. However, the contribution of hydrological variables to algal community’s variation has been rarely reported, and the main drivers of species, trait composition and beta diversity are less studied. This study aimed to link species and trait composition to mu...

There has been increasing interest in diatom-based bio-assessment but we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how to capture diatoms’ temporal dynamics with an appropriate sampling frequency (ASF). To cover this research gap, we collected and analyzed daily riverine diatom samples over a 1-year period (25 April 2013–30 April 2014) at the out...

There has been increasing interest in diatom based bio-assessment but up to now we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how to capture their temporal dynamics with an appropriate sampling frequency (ASF). To cover this research gap, the daily dynamics of diatom community were collected and analyzed over a 1-year period (25 April 2013 -30 Apr...

To understand the lowland riverine phytoplankton communities by both taxonomic and functional group approaches and investigate the effects of abiotic factors on phytoplankton, 59 sites of the Treene catchment were visited in December 2014. Our analyses suggested that the two approaches led to consistent results. High spatial heterogeneity of phytop...

Traditional classification of phytoplankton assemblages does not adequately reflect their ecological function in aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, we used a functional group approach based on the Q index to analyze the spatial and temporal patterns, environmental factors and the ecological status of phytoplankton in the Danjiangkou Reservoir (DJKR) of...