Grant: Alliance Grants

Intermittent rivers are ecosystems that exhibit seasonal stoppage of the streamflow, leading to the partial or total loss of the water surface. With increasing use of water for supporting human activities and climate change, the dry seasons are more intense and lead to an increasing number of intermittent ecosystems. This issue might affect particularly some of the Canada's arid and semi-arid regions, such as southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Given these ecosystems are becoming more common, it is urgent to understand how organisms respond to the seasonal desiccation in natural intermittent ecosystems to properly predict how new intermittent ecosystems will affect biodiversity and ecosystems services. In this sense, we will investigate the ecological and physiological adaptations of fishes inhabiting four intermittent rivers in the Brazilian semiarid region and explore how the seasonal drying of such rivers determine the composition of the fish communities.