Non‐stationary runoff responses can interact with climate change to increase severe outcomes for freshwater ecology

Andrew John, Rory Nathan, Avril Horne, Keirnan Fowler, Michael Stewardson
2022 Water Resources Research  
One of the more pervasive global threats to water resources is climate change (Reid et al., 2019) . Flow alterations influenced by changes in means and variability of climatic conditions present severe threats to water supply and the health and survival of many freshwater species (IPCC, 2014; van Vliet et al., 2013) . Many assessments of climate risk to freshwater ecology commonly focus on direct climate effects on long-term statistics, such as reductions in mean annual precipitation (Chapman
more » ... al., 2014; . However, climate change impacts on river flow regimes will likely be more diverse when considering different flow components and species needs (Arnell & Gosling, 2013) . This has implications for our assessment of risk, particularly to freshwater ecosystems where different environmental stressors can interact to amplify impacts (Birk et al., 2020; Jackson et al., 2016; Ormerod et al., 2010; Wenger et al., 2011) . Climate change and climate variability can lead to extreme shortterm consequences for freshwater ecology through compounding events (Aghakouchak et al., 2020; Vertessy et al., 2019) . Here, we do not focus on short-term extremes due to difficulties in quantitatively predicting such
doi:10.1029/2021wr030192 fatcat:5oqmoq3qsrec5kerxrunvmtcla