Alternatives for the biomonitoring of fish and phytoplankton in tropical streams

By

De Oliveira Barbosa, Hugo
Borges Machado, Karine
Carvalho Vieira, Maisa
Rodrigo Pereira, Hasley
Fernandes Gomes, Leonardo
Carlos Nabout, João
Barreto Teresa, Fabrício
Vieira, Ludgero Cardoso Galli

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2019-11-7

Original Publication

Neotropical Biology and Conservation

Volume

14

Series / Issue

Issue: 4

Pages

361--380

Subjects

biological surrogates , Cerrado , ecological classification , Environmental monitoring , functional groups

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Brazil Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/neotropical.14.e38088

 

Abstract

Biomonitoring programs need to balance accurate responses in assessments of changes in biological communities with sampling that is fast and low cost. In this study, we evaluated the concordance among fish and phytoplankton communities of streams. We tested the cross-taxa surrogacy, taxonomic, numerical resolution and ecological substitute group (habitat use and trophic guilds) resolution with Procrustes analyses aim of simplifying the biomonitoring process. We collect a total fish abundance of 8,461 individuals, represented by the ecological classes of habitat, including benthic, nektonic, nektobenthic, marginal and trophic guilds by detritivore, terrestrial invertivore, aquatic invertivore, piscivore, algivore and herbivore. We sampled a phytoplankton total density of 1,466.68 individuals/ml, represented by four Morphology-Based Functional Groups and nine Reynolds Functional Groups. Our results don’t support the use of substitute groups among fish and phytoplankton. For fish, habitat use and trophic guild are good surrogates for species-level data. Additionally, our results don’t support the use of functional groups as surrogates for phytoplankton. We suggest the use of higher taxonomic levels (genus and family) and record only the occurrence of species and/or genus for fish and phytoplankton. Our findings contribute to decreasing the costs and time of biomonitoring programs assessments and/or conservation plans on fish and phytoplankton communities of headwater streams.