Tolerance

Our studies on tolerances enabled us to better understand degradation and recovery trajectories. According to the ARC, tolerances are key to understanding degradation and (to a lesser degree) recovery trajectories. Several RESIST projects addressed species’ tolerances through experiments and meta-analyses:

• A systematic literature review, including references published in various languages, resulted in data on heat tolerance for 250+ benthic invertebrate and 300+ fish species from six continents (Bayat et al., preprint).
• A global meta-analysis resulted in a classification of salinity effects on a variety of indicators of thermal tolerance (including optimum temperature, thermal limits, and thermal breadth) of organisms and involved various eukaryotic aquatic organism groups, i.e. algae, heterotrophic protists, macrophytes, parasites, fungi, invertebrates, and fish (Farias et al., 2024a).
• A bell-shaped curve was often observed in the response of the diatoms to temperature changes, while their growth tended to decrease with increasing electrical conductivity (Le et al., 2023).