More than one million barriers fragment Europe’s rivers
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Date
2020-12-16
Authors
Belletti, Barbara
Garcia de Leaniz, Carlos
Jones, Joshua
Bizzi, Simone
Börger, Luca
Segura, Gilles
Castelletti, Andrea
van de Bund, Wouter
Aarestrup, Kim
Barry, James
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Springer Nature Ltd.
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Abstract
Rivers support some of Earth’s richest biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services to society, but they are often fragmented by barriers to free flow. In Europe, attempts to quantify river connectivity have been hampered by the absence of a harmonized barrier database. Here we show that there are at least 1.2 million instream barriers in 36 European countries (with a mean density of 0.74 barriers per kilometre), 68 per cent of which are structures less than two metres in height that are often overlooked. Standardized walkover surveys along 2,715 kilometres of stream length for 147 rivers indicate that existing records underestimate barrier numbers by about 61 per cent. The highest barrier densities occur in the heavily modified rivers of central Europe and the lowest barrier densities occur in the most remote, sparsely populated alpine areas. Across Europe, the main predictors of barrier density are agricultural pressure, density of river-road crossings, extent of surface water and elevation. Relatively unfragmented rivers are still found in the Balkans, the Baltic states and parts of Scandinavia and southern Europe, but these require urgent protection from proposed dam developments. Our findings could inform the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, which aims to reconnect 25,000 kilometres of Europe’s rivers by 2030, but achieving this will require a paradigm shift in river restoration that recognizes the widespread impacts caused by small barriers.
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Keywords
River restoration , Biodiversity
Citation
Belletti, B., Garcia de Leaniz, C., Jones, J., Bizzi, S., Börger, L., Segura, G., Castelletti, A., Van de Bund, W., Aarestrup, K., Barry, J., Belka, K., et al. (2020) ''More than one million barriers fragment Europe’s rivers', Nature, 588, pp.436-441. doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-3005-2
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© 2020, The Authors, under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a paper published as: Belletti, B., Garcia de Leaniz, C., Jones, J., Bizzi, S., Börger, L., Segura, G., Castelletti, A., Van de Bund, W., Aarestrup, K., Barry, J., Belka, K., et al. (2020) ''More than one million barriers fragment Europe’s rivers', Nature, 588, pp.436-441, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-3005-2. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3005-2