Susceptibility of European freshwater fish to climate change: species profiling based on life-history and environmental characteristics

Abstract

Climate change is expected to strongly affect freshwater fish communities. Combined with other anthropogenic impacts, it will influence species distributions, and contribute to population declines and local extinctions. To provide timely management and conservation, it is important to identify those species that will be most impacted by climate change and those that will be resilient. Species traits are considered as a promising source of information on characteristics that influence resilience to various environmental conditions and impacts. We collated life history traits and climatic niches of all European freshwater fish species and compared those identified as susceptible to climate change to those that are considered to be resilient. Species list (n = 441, following exclusion of mismatches) was obtained from the IUCN Red List database, including threat level classification, range map polygons, and information whether climate change was indicated as one of the threats. Life-history and bioclimatic spatial data were obtained from FishBase and WorldClim databases. Relationship between species susceptibility to climate change and 43 explanatory variables was assessed using boosted regression trees (BRT). Significant differences were observed between the two groups in their life-history and climatic niches, such as species body size, longevity, range size, distribution and thermal envelopes. We establish a list of species of highest priority for further research and monitoring regarding climate change susceptibility. Results will contribute to a better understanding of traits that are related to climate change susceptibility of European freshwater fish. Further research should be focused on the improvement of methods for climate change susceptibility assessments, which would allow more reliable and systematic species profiling.