Abstract
Understanding stream fish responses to landscape stressors is fundamental to designing management strategies to conserve and restore fluvial ecosystems. Landscape stressors, including agricultural, pasture, and urban land use, often elicit threshold responses in stream fishes, causing rapid declines in abundance with comparatively small increases in stressor intensity. However, the use of thresholds to inform conservation and restoration decision-making remains limited, particularly when targeting entire stream fish assemblages at continental spatial extents. Here, we apply known threshold values to characterize the vulnerability of stream fishes across ~1.73 million stream reaches in the United States and Europe. We develop a decision-support framework that integrates threshold status indices with network catchment summaries of protected area coverage to prioritize (a) conservation actions in poorly protected catchments approaching land use thresholds and (b) restoration actions in catchments that have exceeded thresholds despite high protected area coverage. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of stream fishes to landscape stressors across two continents and demonstrate how integrating threshold-based vulnerability assessments with protected area summaries can support management decision-making and help address the freshwater biodiversity crisis.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all partners who contributed to the database of the European Fish Index Plus project (EFI+) and the United States National Fish Habitat Partnership (NFHP) for providing fish sampling data. We also thank the Fulbright Austria Foundation and the European Union ERASMUS+ program for supporting the exchanges of K.J.B. and D.M.I. at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) and R.S. and M.S. at Michigan State University (MSU), which enriched the development of this project. K.J.B. and D.M.I. were supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Aquatic Gap Project (agreement no. G21AC00013) and Michigan State University. F.B. and M.S. were supported by the Horizon Europe project DANUBElifelines (contract no. 101213836).
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Brumm, K.J., Schinegger, R., Schürz, M. et al. Applying ecological thresholds to inform conservation and restoration efforts for stream fishes.
npj biodivers (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-026-00144-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-026-00144-7
Source: Ecology - nature.com
