A Stream Multimetric Macroinvertebrate Index (MMI) for the Sand Hills Ecoregion of the Southeastern Plains, USA

Abstract

A macroinvertebrate multimetric index is an effective tool for assessing the biological integrity of streams. However, data collected under a single protocol may not be available for an entire region. We sampled macroinvertebrates from the full extent of the Sand Hills ecoregion Level IV of the Southeastern Plains with a standard protocol during the summers of 2010-2012. We evaluated the performance of 94 metrics through a series of screening criteria and built 48 macroinvertebrate multimetric indexs with combinations of the best performing metrics, representing richness, habit, functional feeding guild, sensitivity, and community composition. A series of narrative-response tests for each macroinvertebrate multimetric index was used to find the best performing macroinvertebrate multimetric index which we called the Sand Hills macroinvertebrate multimetric index. The Sand Hills macroinvertebrate multimetric index consisted of the measures Biotic Index, % Shredder taxa, Clinger taxa(2)/total taxa, Plecoptera and Trichoptera richness, and Tanytarsini taxa(2)/Chironomidae taxa. Comparison of the Sand Hills macroinvertebrate multimetric index with existing assessment tools calculated with our data indicated that the Sand Hills macroinvertebrate multimetric index performs at a high level with regard to identifying degraded sites and in its response to stress gradients.

Horizontal and vertical movements of starry smooth-hound Mustelus asterias in the northeast Atlantic

“…The timing of the day-night shift was calculated using a two-step process. Firstly, sunrise and sunset times for each 24-hour cycle were extracted using the sunrise.set function in the StreamMetabolism package [ 49 ]. Secondly, a one-hour buffer was added to both sunrise and sunset to ensure that data were not included for crepuscular periods.…”

Aquatic ecosystem health assessment of a typical sub-basin of the Liao River based on entropy weights and a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method

“…The most common methods of river health assessment mainly include predictive modeling methods and multi-index evaluation methods 25–28 . In multivariate assessment methods 29,30 , river health assessments generally use the corresponding environmental parameters and biological indicators 31 as the basis for evaluation through index calculations.…”

A predictive multimetric index based on macroinvetebrates for Atlantic Forest wadeable streams assessment

“…However, a great difficulty in the identification of the metrics sensitivity to anthropogenic impact is that they also can be affected by natural gradients such as altitude, precipitation and temperature, among others. Therefore, MMIs are generally developed for ecoregions or river typologies with the same natural conditions (Kosnicki et al 2016, Munne & Prat 2009. Factors such as slope, altitude and type of substrate, for example, which may vary internally in previously defined ecoregions, may also influence the macroinvertebrate community and may even be more critical than the larger scale factors (Hawkins & Vinson 2000, Munn et al 2009.…”

“…Developing biomonitoring tools for large spatial scales is far more challenging than defining local tools for small regions, but this approach has been developed and studied in the USA , Klemm et al 2003, Blocksom & Johnson 2009, Flotemersch et al 2014, Kosnicki et al 2016 and in the EU (Böhmer et al 2004, Gabriels et al 2010, Mondy et al 2012. The development of a national biomonitoring program as systematic management is under study in Brazil (Buss et al 2015).…”