BBI: an R package for the computation of Benthic Biotic Indices from composition data

By

Cordier, Tristan
Pawlowski, Jan

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2018-7-5

Original Publication

Metabarcoding and metagenomics

Volume

2

Pages

1--4

Subjects

Benthos , biomonitoring , biotic indices , composition data , R package

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers 2017-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.2.25649

 

Abstract

The monitoring of impacts of anthropic activities in marine environments, such as aquaculture, oil-drilling platforms or deep-sea mining, relies on Benthic Biotic Indices (BBI). Several indices have been formalised to reduce the multivariate composition data into a single continuous value that is ascribed to a discrete ecological quality status. Such composition data is traditionally obtained from macrofaunal inventories, which is time-consuming and expertise-demanding. Important efforts are ongoing towards using High-Throughput Sequencing of environmental DNA (eDNA metabarcoding) to replace or complement morpho-taxonomic surveys for routine biomonitoring. The computation of BBI from such composition data is usually being undertaken by practitioners with excel spreadsheets or through custom script. Hence, the updating of reference morpho-taxonomic tables and cross studies comparison could be hampered. Here we introduce the R package BBI for the computation of BBI from composition data, either obtained from traditional morpho-taxonomic inventories or from metabarcoding data. Its aim is to provide an open-source, transparent and centralised method to compute BBI for routine biomonitoring.