Diversity in Motion: How Europe’s River Landscapes Shape Aquatic Plant Life

Tundra Swan

07-10-2025

Kingfisher has a habit of protecting his territory. When he encounters foreign birds approaching from a distance, trespassing on his territory, Kingfisher vigorously defends his sovereignty. During such encounters, Kingfisher can employ various techniques: darting forward like a bullet, making shrill calls, brandishing claws, and flapping wings. During the confrontation, Kingfisher accepts the usual peace and tranquility to be disrupted. Thanks to having gone through many battles like these, Kingfisher’s pond territory has remained peaceful until today.

In “Innovation”; Wild Wise Weird [1]

© Wix

Freshwater ecosystems—home to some of the planet’s richest biodiversity—are under increasing threat from human activity and climate change [2,3]. A new study by Jiang et al. [4], published in Landscape Ecology, reveals how the diversity of aquatic plants in European rivers depends on the heterogeneity of their environments—especially the variations in altitude and geology that make each river basin unique.

The research team surveyed 145 rivers across five countries—Portugal, Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Finland—to understand how differences in climate, topography, and land use influence aquatic plant communities. They analyzed beta diversity, a measure of how species composition changes between sites, and broke it down into two components: species replacement (when one species substitutes another across environments) and species richness difference (variations in total species number) [5,6].

The findings challenge the idea of universal biodiversity rules. At the regional scale, river plant diversity tended to increase or remain stable with latitude, but across Europe, it declined toward the north. Species replacement, rather than simple loss or gain, dominated across all regions—especially in environmentally varied landscapes like Germany and Portugal. Crucially, environmental heterogeneity—expressed through altitude range and geodiversity—emerged as the strongest driver of total macrophyte beta diversity across Europe.

The study underscores that biological diversity mirrors the complexity of the environments that sustain it. Just as rivers weave through multiple terrains, ecosystems thrive when environmental variation allows coexistence and adaptation. This resonates with the concept of Nature Quotient (NQ)—our ability to recognize, value, and harmonize with nature’s diversity. A society with high NQ would design policies and conservation strategies that protect rivers not as static resources, but as living systems requiring balance and cooperation among all stakeholders [7,8].

In this sense, sustaining aquatic biodiversity becomes a pathway toward individual and social peace. The flowing river, constantly transforming yet interconnected, symbolizes the harmony between diversity and unity—a lesson both ecological and philosophical [9].

References

[1] Vuong QH. (2024). Wild Wise Weird. https://books.google.com/books?id=N10jEQAAQBAJ

[2] Albert JS, et al. (2020). Scientists’ warning to humanity on the freshwater biodiversity crisis. Ambio, 50, 86-94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01318-8

[3] Sayer CA, et al. (2025). One-quarter of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction. Nature, 638, 138-145. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08375-z

[4] Jiang X, et al. (2025). Environmental heterogeneity governing river macrophyte beta diversity in Europe is scale- and context-dependent. Landscape Ecology, 40, 191. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-025-02212-y

[5] Heino J, et al. (2024). Navigating the spatial and temporal aspects of beta diversity to facilitate understanding biodiversity change. Global Ecology and Conservation, 56, e03343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2024.e03343

[6] Anderson MJ, et al. (2011) Navigating the multiple meanings of b diversity: a roadmap for the practicing ecologist. Ecology Letters, 14, 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01552.x

[7] Nguyen MH. (2024). How can satirical fables offer us a vision for sustainability? Visions for Sustainability, 23(11267), 323-328. https://doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/11267

[8] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2025). On Nature Quotient. Pacific Conservation Biology, 31, PC25028. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC25028

[9] Nguyen MH, Ho MT, La VP. (2025). On “An” (安): Inner peace through uncertainty, nature quotient, and harmony with Dao. http://books.google.com/books/about?id=NIKMEQAAQBAJ