Fish and aquatic biodiversity of the Kura River under pollution, flow alteration and climate pressures

Abstract

The Kura River supports a diverse aquatic community that includes fish, benthic organisms, mollusks, crustaceans, plankton and semi-aquatic mammals, while also sustaining fisheries, water supply and other ecosystem services. This study develops a five-author school research project into a structured academic synthesis of aquatic biodiversity and the pressures affecting river organisms. The original project used online research, textbooks, visual materials, Google Earth and NASA WorldWind, and focused on fish and other aquatic animals, pollution, changing water levels, overfishing and climate-related stress. The present article preserves the project’s original organism profiles and visual diagrams while comparing them with recent peer-reviewed and regional evidence. The literature confirms that the Kura supports multiple freshwater fish taxa and that its aquatic biota is exposed to interacting water-quality, habitat, flow and exploitation pressures. Recent studies document downstream hydrochemical changes, fish-health stress at the Kura mouth, parasite occurrence in freshwater fish, and broader Caspian sturgeon conservation concerns. The numerical decline diagrams prepared in the original project are retained for transparency but are treated as illustrative indices rather than verified population time series because the underlying raw dataset was not available. The study concludes that pollution prevention, fishery control, habitat and riparian protection, ecological monitoring and restoration should be pursued together. These measures also have green-economy relevance because aquatic biodiversity supports fisheries, recreation, landscape value and the natural capital on which resilient local development depends.