IberRios
A collaborative project to explore global change impacts on Iberian river biodiversity and ecosystem functions
Project overview
The Iberian River Observatory (IberRios) is led by Cayetano Gutiérrez-Cánovas with funds from Ministry of Science and Innovation and brings together a multidisciplinary network of >80 scientists and practitioners to develop a large-scale observatory for the monitoring of multiple stressor impacts on river biodiversity and ecosystem functions.
Through this collaborative network, IberRios is collecting information on a wide range of river organisms (i.e. prokaryotes, fungi, algae, macrophytes, macroinvertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) and ecosystem functions (e.g. carbon and nutrient cycling, pathogen control, thermal regulation) over multiple years (LTER) and across a large spatial scale.
IberRios’ specific objectives are:
- Testing and optimizing methodologies for collaborative long-term characterization of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in large-scale observatories
- Investigating long-term trends of river communities and populations in a multiple stressor context
- Exploring spatio-temporal variation of ecosystem functioning and its response to multiple stressors and biodiversity change
My role
I am part of the diatom group where I contribute expertise in sample preparation, taxonomic classification, and data analyses of freshwater diatom communities.