Macroinvertebrates and Fishes as Bioindicators of Stream Water Pollution

Abstract

Freshwater ecosystems worldwide have been progressively deteriorated during the past decades due to an increasing human pressure that has lead to a decrease in aquatic biodiversity. Among the human activities of high impact on freshwater ecosystems is the land-use change, principally from native forests to agriculture. To evaluate the impacts of human activities on water quality, a traditional approach has considered the use of single physical-chemical parameters. However, this approach may be insufficient to fully assess the impact of these human activities on freshwaters. Therefore, there is a need for alternative tools such as the indices of biotic integrity that may provide a complement to traditional approaches. In the literature, there are several examples of biotic indicators that have shown promising results in evaluating water quality including the use of macroinvertebrates and fish diets. Here, we provide a review of the indicators of biotic integrity that included fish assemblages as well as macroinvertebrates as bioindicators. We identify pros and cons of using aquatic communities as indicators of water quality. Finally, we develop a procedure that combines fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages as bioindicators and discuss their effectiveness using illustrative examples from streams under several agricultural uses in the Mediterranean region of Chile.

Comparing the performance of 12S mitochondrial primers for fish environmental DNA across ecosystems

“…Fishes are excellent bioindicators of ecosystem health (Chovanec et al, 2003; Fierro et al, 2017) and fulfil many ecosystem services (Holmlund & Hammer, 1999), which led to the development of multiple primer pairs to monitor their diversity and composition within freshwater (Cilleros et al, 2019; Milhau et al, 2019) and marine environments (Nguyen et al, 2020; Polanco Fernandez et al, 2021). Most studies have conducted eDNA surveys of fish assemblages using a single set of primers without prior evaluation of potential bias for the studied taxonomic group or ecosystem (e.g., Balasingham et al, 2017; Kelly et al, 2014).…”

Stream community richness predicts apex predator occupancy dynamics in riparian systems

“…The use of macroinvertebrates to assess stream quality is further bolstered by their importance to ecosystem functions such as decomposition, and they can propagate both bottom-up and top-down processes because they tend to occupy middle trophic levels and contribute to subsidy fluxes (Wallace andWebster 1996, Baxter et al 2005). Fish communities also are used as indicators of stream quality, as changes to water conditions and land use can alter food resources and communities at higher trophic levels (Karr 1981, 1991, Fierro et al 2017.…”

Bioassessment of Mandakini River with the help of aquatic macroinvertebrates in the vicinity of Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary

“…On the contrary, at medium disturbed sites, the diversity of benthic fauna was maximum and the reason could be due to moderate anthropogenic stress in which specialists could not survive and thus give generalists the opportunity to diversify (He et al 2018). The fundamental concept behind the biotic index is based on the fact that most genera are sensitive to organic pollution (Rosenbery and Resh 1993;Fierro et al 2017;Wan Abdul Ghani et al 2018…”