Associate Professor Sakie Kodama Wins Poster Excellence Award at River Ecology Academic Research Society!

At the 25th River Ecology Academic Research Presentation (Tsukishima Social Education Hall) held on November 2, 2023, Associate Professor Sakie Kodama of the Institute of Freshwater Biology won the Poster Excellence Award at the River Ecology Academic Research Society. The poster, titled “Relationship between Fish Diversity and Environment in the Shinano River: toward understanding habitat continuity,” presented a large-scale monitoring survey conducted over three years from 2021 to 2023 to investigate the relationship between fish resources and the environment and river structure in the Chikuma and Shinano Rivers. Environmental DNA was used to measure fish distribution, population, and haplotypes, with water quality (water temperature, pH, DO, neonicotinoids) as explanatory variables, and sections divided by dams, tributaries, and main stream were distinguished. As a result, 61 fish species from 18 families and 42 genera were detected. In addition, ordinal regression was performed using the number of eDNA reads as an indicator of population size, and it was found that water quality and river structure explained population size well. Geographic variation was detected in several species for several haplotypes representing genetic variation within a species, suggesting a relationship with fragmentation.