Multimetric Index to Evaluate Water Quality in Lagoons: A Biological and Geomorphological Approach

Abstract

In recent years, Multimetric Indices (MMIs) have received a lot of attention thanks to their ability to develop integrative evaluations of water quality, particularly in lagoons. In this article, we propose a new MMI for determining the water quality in lagoons. The proposed index is composed of biotic and abiotic indicators, in particular macroinvertebrates, macrophytes and morphological indicators. The proposed index is based on a geometric representation of a phenomenon associated with an ecological system, the ecosystem elements are mapped as vertices of a network and the relationship between them is represented by the corresponding edges. We classify the status of water bodies, from very low to very high using the ecological quality ratio. We compare our index with different different indices that measure water quality, such as General Biotic Index (JP(G)), Macrophyte Index for River (MIR) and Shannon diversity index (H’) and validate our index with Pearson’s correlation coefficient. A strong correlation with the JP(G) and MIR indices (R2 = 0.8605 and R2=0.7661, respectively) is obtained. Although the proposed index is composed of other indices, the independence of the proposed index with respect to its component indices is proven and the structure of the geometric model associated to the proposed network is studied. A close relationship between the measure called medium articulation and the geometric model associated with the proposed index is highlighted, which allows to determine the missing relationships in the network using structural analysis. The proposed index presents a more comprehensive measure than most indices currently used and has the advantage in the scalability, since other existing indicators can be integrated into our model.

Construction of an integral index based on macroinvertebrates to determine the quality of water with agro-industrial influence

“…Sin embargo, como se observó en este estudio el índice integral a diferencia de los otros índices, es una herramienta capaz de determinar eficientemente la integridad ecológica en una variedad de escalas espaciales con diferentes actividades agroindustriales. Al igual que el índice integral desarrollado existen otros índices multimétricos como el índice biótico de macroinvertebrados (Li et al, 2021) e IMARBO (Vera-Sanches et al, 2020) que tienen también la ventaja de incluir de forma complementaria parámetros fisicoquímicos y biológicos; sin embargo, el índice integral propuesto en esta investigación incluye adicionalmente un parámetro de biodiversidad (número efectivo de familias de orden 2), esta capacidad del índice integral propuesto y de los multimétricos, demuestra la fortaleza que presentan estos índices para incluir parámetros de acuerdo a las particularidades propias de un ecosistema acuático con influencia agroindustrial en el que se requiere determinar la calidad del agua (Hernández-Mira et al, 2021).…”

“…Para resolver estos inconvenientes, la evaluación de la calidad del agua en los ecosistemas lóticos debe de ser abordada mediante la relación integral entre los organismos y las variables abióticas del hábitat (Jun et al, 2012). De esta forma el índice integral proporciona una fácil interpretación (Saal et al, 2021); ya que concentra la información de varios niveles de organización ecológica en una sola medida (Hernández-Mira et al, 2021), es una metodología poco costosa en su aplicación (Jun, et al, 2012;Baptista et al, 2011)., refleja de manera confiable las respuestas biológicas de la biota a la intervención humana (Li et al, 2021) y son sensibles a los análisis estadísticos (Yorulmaz et al, 2021). Es por ello que esta investigación tiene el objetivo de construir un índice integral para determinar la calidad del agua; el cual será una herramienta capaz de determinar eficientemente la calidad del agua, en una variedad de escalas espaciales con diferentes actividades agroindustriales.…”

Biomathematical Model for Water Quality Assessment: Macroinvertebrate Population Dynamics and Dissolved Oxygen

“…In this direction, the assessment of the quality of freshwater ecosystems is fundamental, and the development of prospective methods contributes to this purpose. Some methods for assessing water quality make use of indicators that include biological, physicochemical, and geomorphological parameters (see [2][3][4][5][6], and references therein). In addition, it has been shown that such indicators directly or inversely relate to some parameters [7].…”