Distribution of aquatic beetles from the east of Morocco (Coleoptera, Polyphaga)

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 921 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

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How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Mabrouki, Y., Taybi, A. F., Chavanon, G., Berrahou, A., Millán, A., 2018. Distribution of aquatic beetles from the east of Morocco (Coleoptera, Polyphaga). Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. Dataset/Occurrence: https://doi.org/10.15470/saajc8

Rights

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The publisher and rights holder of this work is Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: c67decad-0b17-4383-9f12-1a87f6a6a6ca.  Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF Spain.

Keywords

Occurrence; Aquatic Coleoptera; Inventory; Northeastern of Morocco; Moulouya; Monitoring; New records; Occurrence

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

Morocco is currently divided into 12 regions, including the Oriental Region, which occupies almost all the eastern side of the country and covers an area of 90,127 km2. The Oriental Region includes the wilaya of Oujda (Oujda–Angad prefecture) and the provinces of Berkane, Driouch, Figuig, Guercif, Jerada, Nador and Taourirt. The watershed of the Moulouya, which includes nearly 43,412 km2 of eastern Morocco, covers much of the Oriental Region. With a length of 600 km, the Moulouya is the largest Moroccan river flowing into the Mediterranean. The main tributaries are the Oued Ansegmir, Oued Melloulou, Oued Za and Oued Msoun, all permanent. Other tributaries are intermittent

Taxonomic Coverage

Aquatic beetles from the east of Morocco

Project Data

The biodiversity crisis is one of the major challenges facing humanity today (Purvis and Hector, 2000). This massive erosion is due to the increasing acceleration of species’ extinc-tion rate due to anthropogenic activity, causing an irreversible loss of biological information with unpredictable consequences (Kerr and Currie, 1995; Rands et al.,2010). We live in an unprecedented era of biodiversity loss and biologists predict that tens of thousands of species and millions of populations will be extinct in the coming decades (Purvis and Hector, 2000; Barnosky et al.,2011). Biological diversity of continental aquatic ecosystems is generally higher than most other ecosystems (Darwall et al., 2008). As a result, the loss of biodiversity within inland waters would be much greater than in other ecosystems (Allan and Flecker, 1993; Ricciardi and Rasmussen, 1999). Aquatic macroinvertebrates play a vital role in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and consequently in the stability of ecosystems (Wallace and Webster, 1996). They also allow the diagnosis of alterations causes, the establishment of criteria for pro-tection and restoration of interesting ecosystems and finally the integrated management of watersheds (Abellán et al., 2007). Thus, good knowledge of the species presence and distribution is necessary to protect biodiversity (Millán et al., 2014). In this framework, we carried out several studies regarding monitoring of aquatic ecosystems based on macroin-vertebrate communities in Oriental Morocco and the basin of Moulouya River (Daoudi et al., 2017; Mabrouki et al., 2016b, 2017a, 2017c, in press; Taybi, 2016; Taybi et al., 2016b, 2017b, 2018a), including aquatic Adephaga beetles (Taybi et al., 2017a).Water beetles make up a large part of aquatic invertebrates (Jäch and Balke, 2008), so they are ideal candidates to be used as indicators of biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems, given their great specific and functional diversity, the great variety of habitats they are able to colonize and the general good taxonomic and faunistic knowledge (Bilton et al., 2006; Sánchez–Fernández et al., 2006).With the aim of improving knowledge of the water beetles in the east of Morocco and completing previous studies (see Taybi et al.,2017a) on this group, we compiled a com-mented checklist of new and old records on the presence and distribution of the aquatic beetles belonging to the suborder Polyphaga) from Oriental Morocco and the Moulouya basin.

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

In field surveys conducted from 2014 to 2017, more than 100 localities were collected along the basin of Moulouya River and Oriental Region of Morocco (see appendix for the complete list of localities). Most of these sampling sites were visited at least three times. Our goal was to document maximum macroinvertebrate biodiversity in the different microhabitats prospected at each sampling site.

Method step description:

1. The samples of benthic fauna were collected using a kick net, landing nets and clamps. The macroinvertebrates, including water beetles, were identified to species level, placed in accordingly labeled tubes with alcohol at 70% or 96%, and deposited in the collections of aquatic macroinvertebrates at the Laboratory of Water Sciences, Environment and Sustainable Development of the University Mohammed Premier from Oujda (Morocco), and the Department of Ecology and Hydrology, Faculty of Biology, University of Murcia (Spain).

Bibliographic Citations

1. Mabrouki, Y., Taybi, A. F., Chavanon, G., Berrahou, A., Millán, A., 2018. Distribution of aquatic beetles from the east of Morocco (Coleoptera, Polyphaga). Arxius de Miscel·lània Zoològica, 16: 185-211, Doi: https://doi.org/10.32800/amz.2018.16.0185 https://doi.org/10.32800/amz.2018.16.0185

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