The influence of agropastoral environments on the zooplankton community of lentic environments: analysis of the effects on taxonomic diversity and identification of bioindicator species

• Grant number: 24/08145-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology - Ecosystems Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Maria Stela Maioli Castilho Noll
• Grantee: Gabriel Liboni Del Pino Rodrigues
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Aquatic environments are inseparable from anthropic activities because those are responsable for considerable changes in its physicochemical parameters. A especially important category of aquatic bodies in Brazil is the artificial lentic body, used in the storage of water and in generation of eletric energy; and, being important ecosystems, it is essencial to understand the magnitude of the changes caused by these human activities and also develop the ability to recognize environments that have been severely compromised, both goals that can be achieved by studying and exploring the zooplankton community. The goal of this work is to avaliate the relation between taxonomic diversity indexes of zooplankton organisms, different land use gradients and the level of anthropic transformation (measured using Anthropogenic Transformation Index), in addition to investigating the existence of bioindicator species for different landscape conditions using the INDVAL index. To achieve that, the physicochemical and zooplanktonic community data of 13 reservoirs collected in a previous project will be used together with land use data from the time provided by the Mapbiomas iniciative. The taxonomic indices of the zooplankton community will be related to the different land use porcentages and to the anthropic transformation index through generalized mixed models. The data analysis will be realized using softwares like 'QGIS', used in treatment of landscape data, and 'Rstudio', used in statistical analysis. It is expected that this work will lead to relevant results finding correlation between soil and zooplankton community and being able to establish bioindicator species between these organisms, in addition to contributing to Sustainable Development Goals number six and fifteen, "Clean water and sanitation" and "Life on land", investigating relevant themes to the conservation of water bodies.