Freshwater ecology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Human changes to freshwater flows affect marine ecosystems, but such impacts are rarely considered in development plans involving dam building and water abstraction from rivers. Now research shows how approaches that integrate flow management and marine fisheries can improve both freshwater and coastal ecosystem sustainability.

We examined the interactive effects of temperature and the presence of apex fish predators on food web structure in Icelandic geothermal streams. Fish suppressed the biomass of invertebrates and thus released algae from grazing pressure, but only at higher temperatures, which illustrates how the combination of warming and apex predators triggers this trophic cascade.

Food systems must transform to provide undernourished people with greater access to nutrient-rich foods. While there has been a push to increase volumes of food production, too little attention has been paid to the factors that enable access to nutritious aquatic foods.

A global analysis of stream gauges reveals that they are predominantly installed on large, perennially flowing and human-impacted rivers. The current placement of stream gauges does not provide observations that represent the wide variety of global rivers, resulting in a biased dataset, which has broad implications for ecology, hydrology, and freshwater management.