Climate change and hydropower development are two primary stressors affecting riverine ecosystems and both stressors facilitate invasions by non-native species. However, little study has focused on how habitats of native and non-native fishes may be affected by independent or combined impacts of such stressors. Here we used the Jinsha River as an example to predict habitat change and distributional shift of native and non-native fishes with species distribution models. The Jinsha River Basin has nearly 40 cascade dams constructed or planned and located in the Tibetan Plateau, which is sensitive to future climate change. Two climate change scenarios and future hydropower development were combined to produce five scenarios of future changes. Under the impacts of independent extreme climate change or hydropower development, non-native fishes showed greater habitat gain in total, while native fishes shifted their distribution into tributaries and higher elevations, and impacts were stronger in combined scenarios. Habitat overlap between the two groups also increased in future scenarios. Certain fish traits correlated with stressors in habitat change prediction. River basins with hydropower development were shown to face higher risk of non-native fishes invasion under future climate change. As the most biodiverse river basins globally are threatened by hydropower development, our results emphasize the importance of regulating non-native fish introduction in reservoirs. Our approaches are also applicable to other systems globally to better understand how hydropower development and climate change may increase invasion risk, and therefore help conserve native species effectively.
Keywords: Biological invasion; Fish diversity; Global change; Species distribution models; Yangtze River.
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