Origin and development of the biological monitoring working party score system

The impact of a catastrophic storm event on benthic macroinvertebrate communities in upland headwater streams and potential implications for ecological diversity and assessment of ecological status

“…The three metrics calculated were the Small Stream Risk Score (SSRS) (Anonymous, 2005;Kavanagh et al, 2006), the Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP) Score and the Average Score Per Taxon (ASPT) (Hawkes, 1997), previously used in headwater stream assessment in Ireland (Callanan et al, 2008;. The before and after storm metric data were then tested for normality using KolmogorovSmirnov tests and compared using paired t-tests in PASW Statistics 18 (IBM SPSS, 2010).…”

Influences of environmental and chemical parameters on the spatial growth patterns of four riverine cyprinid fishes

“…These surrogate temperature data were the latitude and longitude of each site, with air temperature not used as it was co-correlated with both variables, whereby temperatures decreased significantly from south to north, and from east to west . For water chemistry, the data available were mean concentrations of ammonia, nitrate and phosphate (as orthophosphate) over the study period, and biological water quality as expressed as mean values of the biological monitoring working party score (BMWP) where higher values indicate higher biological water quality (Hawkes, 1998). These data were available as means from data collected by the Environment Agency between 2004 and 2006 from the study reaches (Environment Agency, 2013).…”

The impact of climate-induced distributional changes on the validity of biological water quality metrics

“…Biological monitoring of rivers has been used in Europe for over 100 years (see Hawkes, 1997, for a history of biological monitoring, particularly in Britain) but it is only in the past 40 years that Britain has adopted such a system to compliment other forms of environmental monitoring.…”

“…This is then A"PT prediction and classification system (RIVPACS; Moss et al, 1987). Since the original scheme was designed, scores for each taxon have been revised in light of computer analyses by Walley and Hawkes (1996;1997), leading to a reduction in the uniformity of scores between same-order families.…”