Discerning the impact of anthropogenic impacts requires the implementation of bioindicators that quantify the susceptibilities and vulnerabilities of natural terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to perturbation and transformation. Although legal regulations in Brazil recognize the value of bioindicators in monitoring water quality, the depreciation of soil conditions has yet to receive adequate attention. Thus, our study aimed to evaluate the potential of odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) as amphibiotic bioindicators to reflect the correlation between the degradation of aquatic and terrestrial habitats in pasture-dominated landscapes. We assessed the relationship between the biotic indices of Odonata and the conservation status of preserved riparian landscapes adjacent to anthropogenically altered pastures in 40 streams in the Brazilian savannah. Our results support the hypothesis that Odonata species composition may be a surrogate indicator for soil and water integrity, making them promising sentinels for detecting environmental degradation and guiding conservation strategies in humanaltered landscapes. Importantly, while the Zygoptera/Anisoptera species ratio is a useful bioindicator tool in Brazilian forest, it is less effective in the open savannah here, and so an alternative index is required. Importantly, while the Zygoptera/Anisoptera species ratio is a useful bioindicator tool in Brazilian forest, it is less effective in the open savannah here, and so an alternative index is required. On the other hand, our results showed the Dragonfly Biotic Index to be a suitable tool for assessing freshwater habitats in Brazilian savannah. We also identified certain bioindicator species at both ends of the environment intactness spectrum.

Tropical high-Andean wetlands, locally known as 'bofedales', are key ecosystems sustaining biodiversity, carbon sequestration, water provision and livestock farming. Bofedales' contribution to dry season baseflows and sustaining water quality is crucial for downstream water security. The sensitivity of bofedales to climatic and anthropogenic disturbances is therefore of growing concern for watershed management. This study aims to understand seasonal water storage and release characteristics of bofedales by combining remote sensing analysis and ground-based monitoring for the wet and dry seasons of late 2019 to early 2021, using the glacierised Vilcanota-Urubamba basin (Southern Peru) as a case study. A network of five ultrasound loggers was installed to obtain discharge and water table data from bofedal sites across two headwater catchments. The seasonal extent of bofedales was mapped by applying a supervised machine learning model using Random Forest on imagery from Sentinel-2 and NASADEM. We identified high seasonal variability in bofedal area with a total of 3.5% and 10.6% of each catchment area, respectively, at the end of the dry season (2020), which increased to 15.1% and 16.9%, respectively, at the end of the following wet season (2021). The hydrological observations and bofedal maps were combined into a hydrological conceptual model to estimate the storage and release characteristics of the bofedales, and their contribution to runoff at the catchment scale. Estimated lag times between 1 and 32 days indicate a prolonged bofedal flow contribution throughout the dry season (about 74% of total flow). Thus, our results suggest that bofedales provide substantial contribution to dry season baseflow, water flow regulation and storage. These findings highlight the importance of including bofedales in local water management strategies and adaptation interventions including nature-based solutions that seek to support long-term water security in seasonally dry and rapidly changing Andean catchments.