Map of peninsular India.

<p>Showing the 8 major river basins (thick black lines), 31 sub-basins (thin black or gray lines), major rivers (blue lines), 11 proposed canals under India's Interlinking of Rivers Programme interbasin water transfer plan (IBWT; red lines), and the initial local species richness (LSR; grey shading).</p

System connectivity underlies the loss of species (TSR, total species richness) for both the economic (open red circles) and the ecological (closed blue circles) linking strategies.

<p>This relationship holds for different measures of connectivity. Average degree (panel A; size of circles relative to the average number of connected sub-basins of the peninsular river networks, which increase as unconnected rivers are linked via canals), largest network size (panel B; size of circles relative to the average degree), decrease in the number of river networks (panel C; size of circles relative to the average degree), and number of networks consisting of a single sub-basin (panel D; size of circles relative to the average degree).</p

Average rank (of 130 generations) versus occupancy after each canal link is implemented.

<p>Note log scale of the y axis. Each of the 11 linking steps is represented by one plot. The lower, black line is the rank-occupancy under the no linking step; the solid red line is the resulting occupancy after each link is added under the ‘economic’ linking strategy, and the blue dotted line is the resulting occupancy after each link is added under the ‘ecological’ linking strategy. Each panel is an implementation step, where the canal added under the ecological strategy at a given step is not the same as the canal added in the economic strategy (compare canal implementation in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0034170#pone-0034170-g003" target="_blank">Fig. 3</a>).</p

Plots of the model fits to the data used for the analysis.

<p>Panel A: rank-occupancy for the empirical freshwater fish data (dotted line), neutral model (dashed line; averaged over 120 simulation runs of the rank-occupancy after 130 generations), and the MAXENT-derived rank-occupancy distribution data (solid line). Panel B: relationship between the local species richness (LSR) from the neutral model (y-axis) and the MAXENT-derived distribution data (x-axes). The solid line is the 1∶1 line.</p