TY - JOUR T1 - Status of aquatic and riparian biodiversity in artificial lake ecosystems with and without management for recreational fisheries: implications for conservation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/667493 SP - 667493 AU - Robert Nikolaus AU - Malwina Schafft AU - Andreas Maday AU - Thomas Klefoth AU - Christian Wolter AU - Robert Arlinghaus Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/16/667493.abstract N2 - Humanity is facing a biodiversity crisis, with freshwater-associated biodiversity being in particularly dire state. Novel ecosystems created through human use of mineral resources, such as gravel pit lakes, can provide substitute habitats for conservation of freshwater and riparian biodiversity. However, many of these artificial ecosystems are managed for recreational fisheries and may exhibit high recreational use intensity, which may limit the biodiversity potential of gravel pit lakes.We assessed the species richness of several taxa present in gravel pit lakes and compared a range of taxonomic biodiversity metrics of lakes managed for recreational fisheries (N = 16) and unmanaged reference lakes (N = 10), while controlling for non-fishing related environmental variation.The average species richness of all examined taxa (plants, amphibians, dragonflies, damselflies, waterfowl, songbirds) was similar among both lake types and no faunal or floral breaks were revealed when examining the pooled species inventory of managed and unmanaged lakes. Similarly, there were no differences among management types in the presence of rare species and in the Simpson diversity index across all the taxa that we assessed.Variation in species richness among lakes was correlated with woody habitat, lake morphology (size and steepness) and land use, but not with the presence of recreational fisheries. Thus, non-fishing related environmental variables have stronger effects on local species presence than recreational-fisheries management or the presence of recreational anglers.Collectively, we found no evidence that anglers and recreational-fisheries management constrain the development of aquatic and riparian biodiversity in gravel pits of the study region. ER -