Relationships between forest cover and fish diversity in the Amazon River floodplain

1.Habitat degradation leads to biodiversity loss and concomitant changes in ecosystem processes. Tropical river floodplains are highly threatened by land cover changes and support high biodiversity and important ecosystems services, but the extent to which changes in floodplain land cover affect fish biodiversity remains unknown.

2.We combined fish and environmental data collected in situ and satellite-mapped landscape features to evaluate how fish species with different ecological strategies and assemblage structures respond to deforestation in floodplains of the Amazon River. We surveyed 462 floodplain habitats distributed along a gradient of land cover, from largely forested to severely deforested. Rather than analyze only taxonomic metrics, we employed an integrative approach that simultaneously considers different aspects of fish biodiversity (i.e., beta diversity and taxonomic and functional assemblage structure) to facilitate mechanistic interpretations of the influence of lan...