Jeff Marker and Jeanette Karlsson (research assistant) electrofishing in a small stream.

On Tuesday 1 December Jeffery Marker, RivEM PhD student, will be giving a talk where he presents the plans for his PhD project.

The seminar is held on Zoom and starts at 13:15. Everyone is welcome to attend the seminar. Contact Jeff (jeffery.marker@kau.se) or Olle Calles (olle.calles@kau.se) if you want to attend, and they will send you a link.

Rachel Bowes (RivEM PostDoc) and colleagues have studied the downstream passage of several migrating fish species during spring and fall 2020. Here she writes about their work:

Laxeleratorn at Vattenfall’s Research & Development facility in Älvkarleby

“Dams are like giant road blocks for fish in rivers. It is not always feasible or realistic to remove a dam to restore fish movement throughout rivers, so we need to design detours around them.

When going downstream we call this detour past the dam a bypass. The question we are asking is: How can we design a better bypass for multiple fish species to be able to move downstream past a dam more easily and efficiently? To test this, we are using the Laxeleratorn at Vattenfall’s Research & Development facility in Älvkarleby. We are testing Silver Eels, Salmon, and Roach fish species. Changing the design of the bypass and amount of water flowing through it, we hope to find out what combination creates the optimal bypass for these fish species.”

European eel (Anguilla anguilla)

Lutz Eckstein, professor at Karlstad University, is involved in two recently published papers, studying the effects of invasive Garden Lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus) on vegetation and seed bank of mountain meadow plant communities.

The first paper together with Wiebke Hansen (first author), Julia Wollny, Annette Otte and Kristin Ludewig, published in the journal Biological Invasions (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02371-w), found that the invasion of Garden Lupine homogenizes vegetation composition. The similarity among plots increased with increasing lupine cover in three different vegetation types. L. polyphyllus affected species diversity in terms of richness and effective species number but in rather complex ways, i.e. plots with low to intermediate lupine cover had higher species diversity than control plots. Probably, the invasion though Garden Lupine is linked to significant species turnover. A very clear effect was found for community-weighted means of species trait. In all three vegetation types studied, the canopy height of the community increased with increasing lupine cover, whereas especially in the low-productive Nardus grasslands, leaf dry matter content decreased and specific leaf area increased. Thus, the Garden Lupine shifted the suite of community traits towards more competitive trait values. This may lead to overall more productive plant communities from which rare, low-growing herbs and grasses will disappear.

Germination experiment from the seed bank study in the paper published in Restoration Ecology. Photo: Kristin Ludewig

The second paper with Kristin Ludewig (first author), Wiebke Hansen, Yves Klinger, and Annette Otte, published in the journal Restoration Ecology (https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13311), analyzed the effects of increasing cover of Garden Lupineon the seed bank of mountain meadows, and the potential of the seed bank of these stands for active restoration of mountain meadows in terms of species composition and number. The authors conducted a seed bank analysis on 84 plots with increasing cover of L. polyphyllus in three mountain-meadow types of the Rhön Biosphere Reserve, Germany. Seedlings from 119 species germinated from the seed bank samples, including 17 Red List species but only a few seedlings of L. polyphyllus. While the influence of L. polyphyllus on the current vegetation was visible, no effects on the seed bank were apparent. L. polyphyllus had no influence on total seed density, seed density of typical mountain-meadow species, or species numbers in the seed bank. Only the seeds of the Red List species were significantly related to the cover of L. polyphyllus. The authors conclude that the seed bank offers potential for active restoration of species-rich mountain meadows, but species absent from the seed bank have to be added by other measures.

Kristin Ludewig, Wiebke Hansen and Yves Klinger will presents these and other results from a large restoration project in the UNESCO Rhön Biosphere Reserve at the RivEM week.

Coming up: RivEM week

Posted by Jacqueline Hoppenreijs | RivEM week

RivEM (NRRV) invites you to the first annual RivEM week, where KAU researchers and international guests will present and discuss some of the exciting projects we have been working on! From 17 to 20 November, you are welcome to attend presentations and participate in discussions and workshops. Every session covers a different ecological research theme during the week.

Find more info on http://www.nrrv.se/rivem-week-2020/ and sign up for one or more sessions via rivem@kau.se!