Using fragmentation statistics to complement analysis of woody riparian cover and its influence on the aquatic community

Internship or Bachelor project

Natural riparian vegetation entails the presence of trees in temperate climates. It is thought that woody riparian vegetation enhances the ecological status in streams and rivers. This general fact and many of the specific functions which cause this positive relation are very well documented in literature, mostly based on case studies or reviews.

Lager scale studies, typically fall short of verifying a strong relationship. This is at least partly due to the lack of precise data: Larger scale studies usually rely on percentage cover of woody vegetation towards the total riparian area alone, which does not account for e.g. spatial arrangement, species or functional diversity.

We have high-resolution orthoimages of woody riparian vegetation and want to go beyond simply using percentage cover as a predictor for macroinvertebrate community metrics. In doing so, the project invites you to calculate various landscape metrics (fragmentation, gaps, etc.) using GIS (AcrGIS Pro/Map) and statistics (R) software and test for good indicative performance for biological indicators.

Contact: Martin Palt, Andrés Peredo Arce