Invasive species have been drivers of biodiversity loss and functional changes in aquatic ecosystems, including in protected areas. Therefore, monitoring population invasion dynamics and biological traits is fundamental to better understand their ecological and economic impacts and for management actions development. We followed signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) invasion in Rabaçal River upper reach at...
Olive Anthracnose (OA) and Chestnut Ink Disease (CID), caused by eukaryotic organisms such as fungi and oomycetes, pose significant challenges to agricultural production, causing severe yield losses and reduced quality of harvested products. Currently, chemical pesticides are widely used to control these pathogens. However, this approach can be expensive and ineffective, and may have detrimental environmental a...
Crop diseases caused by fungi or oomycetes are responsible for significant losses in food production worldwide, and are increasingly recognized as a global threat to food security. This crisis derives from concurring factors, which include agricultural practices, global trade and climate change, all of which synergistically impact plants’ fitness, critical to the maintenance of function and services of agro-eco...
Published online: 12 April 2022; Anthropogenic change at a global scale is affecting life on Earth with impacts on freshwaters. Aquatic hyphomycetes are fungi that drive organic matter decomposition in freshwaters and mediate energy transfer to higher trophic levels. Intraspecific trait variability affects ecological processes and can account for species adaptations to environmental change. To ascertain how aqu...
Land cover change scenarios hold far-reaching implications for ecosystem services (ES), highlighting the need for understanding the trade-offs and synergies underlying the provision of multiple ES. The insufficient knowledge of the mechanisms governing the relationships among multiple ES, along with the lack of information on trade-offs among ES under different scenarios, restricts the ability to provide effect...
Freshwaters are considered among the most endangered ecosystems globally due to multiple stressors, which coincide in time and space. These local stressors typically result from land-use intensification or hydroclimatic alterations, among others. Despite recent advances on multiple stressor effects, current knowledge is still limited to manipulative approaches minimizing biological and abiotic variability. Thus...
Aquatic hyphomycetes are key microbial decomposers of allochthonous organic matter in freshwater ecosystems. Although their importance in carbon flow and food webs in streams is widely recognized, there are still gaps in our understanding of their molecular diversity and distribution patterns. Our study utilized the growing database of ITS rDNA barcodes of aquatic hyphomycetes (1252 sequences) and aimed to (i) ...
The application of nanomaterials to remove arsenic (As) from the water represents one of the 21 most promising remediation methods nowadays. In this study, three active materials, including 22 Y2(CO3)3), ZnO/TiO2, and Fe3O4, with different structural and morphological properties, were 23 evaluated for their As(V) adsorption capacity in contaminated water. Thus, the adsorption 24 behaviour was evaluated, includi...
First published: 15 October 2021; Mounting evidence points to a linkage between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (B-EF). Global drivers, such as warming and nutrient enrichment, can alter species richness and composition of aquatic fungal assemblages associated with leaf-litter decomposition, a key ecosystem process in headwater streams. However, effects of biodiversity changes on ecosystem functions migh...
Invasive alien species (IAS) are leading to the homogenisation of taxonomic and functional biodiversity, with negative consequences for key ecosystem processes in fresh water. Invasive signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) is expected to disrupt detritus-based food webs by affecting leaf breakdown and/or by decreasing invertebrate density and diversity through predation. The combination of per-capita and a...