Biodiversity of multi-trophic biological communities within riverine sediments impacted by PAHs contamination and land use changes

The aims of this study are to clarify how the spread of PAHs and land use changes at the catchment scale in the watershed influence the distribution of whole community biodiversity in sediments of river ecosystem. In the present study, the spatial distribution of species across multi-trophic levels, including bacteria, algae, metazoan, and fish etc., in sediments of Beiluo River were characterized by 12S rRNA, 16S rRNA, 18S rRNA, and Cytochrome Oxidase subunit I genes (COI) DNA metabarcoding. The biodiversity of river ecosystem in response to 16 priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) compounds, land use changes at the catchment scale, and sediment quality parameters were evaluated by partial least-squares path model (PLS-PM), co-occurrence network analysis, heatmaps, and redundancy analysis (RDA). This is the first study investigating the characteristics of multitrophic level biological communities in river impacted by PAHs contamination and land use changes.