FishMe

Social and ecological effects of Fish removal in Mountain Ecosystems

Creaf leader

The innovative research of FishME will be to evaluate the threat of fish introductions to high mountain lakes. With the FishME Management Toolbox, we will enable science to predict future impacts on ecosystem health of mountain lakes and the resulting socio-economic risks for society.

Supporting FishME would create the unique opportunity to establish and subsequently strengthen the link of functional ecology, socio-ecology, microbial ecology, limnology and systems biology, a highly relevant and innovative step in modern biodiversity research, restoration and conservation.

Mountain ecosystems and the services they provide to society face multiple threats derived from climate and global change and their interactions with sociocultural, economic, and political aspects. In particular, mountain ecosystems have been and will continue to be severely impacted by global change, threatening the sustenance of over 50% of the human population.

Mountain aquatic ecosystems, in addition to being one of the most important reservoirs of drinking water for human populations, represent critical biodiversity hotspots in generally dispersed high-altitude landscapes. Recent fish introductions exert pressure on these critical ecosystems, including relatively small lakes and adjacent wetlands.

Currently, the use of small fish such as the red barb as live bait for trout fishing is driving a new wave of invasions. The ecological impact of these fish introductions represents a bleak scenario, as lakes may lose any recreational value and almost all of their natural biodiversity.

Objectives

The three main questions posed by FishME are:

What are the socioeconomic and environmental motivations behind the introduction of fish into mountain ponds?
What impacts have fish introductions had so far, and what is their future social and ecological repercussion under global change scenarios?
How can the harmful effects of fish introductions be mitigated while minimizing the impact on the livelihoods and well-being of local human populations?

Actions

FishME will build upon the available data from projects conducted by consortium members and will complement this information with new data from 6 lakes in the French and Catalan Pyrenees, as well as the Italian and Austrian Alps (a total of 24 lakes). These lakes are distributed along altitudinal gradients to capture the different climatic conditions that mountain lakes are subjected to.

The work, structured into different work packages, will be synthesized into a fish removal guide and a decision support tool for formulating regional conservation policies. Fish Removal Toolbox will include tools to predict eradication efforts, success probabilities, and the sizes of residual populations from eradication processes, as well as assessments of the potential of non-invasive eradication techniques to counteract red barb invasions and alternative, much larger, and ecologically more complex methods.

Proyecto PCI2022-132949 financiado por MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 y por la Unión Europea NextGenerationEU/PRTR