Taxonomic or ecological approaches? Searching for phytoplankton surrogates in the determination of richness and assemblage composition in ponds

Higher Taxa Predict Plankton Beta-diversity Patterns Across an Eutrophication Gradient

“…Congruence values above 0.75 indicate high concordance between the results generated by different taxonomic levels, i.e., a higher taxonomic level can be a satisfactory surrogate for another (Lovell et al 2007). Other studies with algae also found high congruence values and a decrease in congruence with decreasing taxonomic resolution (Carneiro et al 2010;Gallego et al 2012;Heino & Soininen 2007;Rimet & Bouchez 2012). Similar findings were reported by Nielsen et al (1998) for rotifer communities, whereas another study, also regarding rotifer communities, indicated that only the use of genera recovered the species-level patterns (Azemar et al 2010).…”

“…The use of higher taxa is also recommended to detect aquatic pollution (Khan 2006). For instance, in comparisons using phytoplankton (Gallego et al 2012) and benthic diatoms (Rimet & Bouchez 2012), the performance of predictive models to reconstruct nutrient concentrations was equivalent from order to species levels. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the relationship between human disturbance and biological response using a coarser taxonomic resolution (Birk et al 2012).…”

Spatial and temporal trends in order richness of marine phytoplankton as a tracer for the exchange zone between coastal and open waters

“…However, not only richness on a species level can be used to assess such ecological relationships (Gaston et al, 1993). The higher taxon approach was first used for terrestrial ecosystem (Balmford et al, 1996, and literature therein) and is now also transferred to aquatic ecosystems (Passy and Legendre, 2006;Heino and Soininen, 2007;Gallego et al, 2012;Carneiro et al, 2013;Mueller et al, 2013;Machado et al, 2015). Several studies dealing with the higher taxon approach in freshwater algae (e.g.…”

Morphology-based classification of functional groups for potamoplankton

“…Studies applying MBFG (Pacheco et al, 2010;Segura et al, 2013) and those compared MBFG with FG and (Gallego et al, 2012;Izaguirre et al, 2012;Hu et al, 2013) in a range of lentic water (lakes, ponds, and reservoirs) commended the high simplification and practicality of MBFG. Given that the MBFG was initially proposed for lakes, only a few researches have used it to investigate and compare the phytoplankton assemblages in riverine ecosystems and have concluded low sensitivity (Centis et al, 2010;Stanković et al, 2012;Mihaljević et al, 2015).…”