Abstract

Hypoxia refers to a lack of dissolved Oxygen in the environment. It can be caused by pollution and can lead to nutrient enrichment. This research focuses on how hypoxia impacts the structure and functioning of food webs and the resulting impacts on trophic relationships and species susceptibility. The oxygen depletion impacts on biodiversity and the compartment (ecosystem) stability motivate the integration of oxygen depletion as a variable in the trophic and food webs. The suggested approaches involve in-situ water quality monitoring, trophic and food web analysis, stable isotopes (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N), and the EwE (Ecopath with Ecosim) modeling to analyze energy flow impacts of varying oxygen levels. In the research, hypoxic area spatial analysis will be done by interpolating dissolved Oxygen and nutrients using GIS. Species vulnerability and resilience in heavily polluted waters will be predicted using Random Forest and PCA clustering. Results should show how prolonged hypoxia shrinks available habitats, decompresses them, and promotes species like detritivores and other opportunists. Top predators in the food chain become less abundant, and aggregate system resilience declines. Impacts should lead to the formulation of advanced pollution mitigation and hypoxia recovery approaches.

Keywords: Hypoxia, Food webs in aquatic systems, Vulnerability of different species, Contaminated waters, Ecopath modelling, Isotope analysis, Geographic information systems (GIS) mapping, Ecosystem-machine interactions, Systems resilience, Dynamics of dissolved oxygen