appraisal of a biocontamination assessment method for freshwater macroinvertebrate assemblages; a practical way to measure a significant biological pressure

• Published in: Hydrobiologia 2010, Vol.638 (1), p.151-159
• Main Authors: MacNeil, Calum, Briffa, Mark, Leuven, Rob S. E. W, Gell, Fiona R, Selman, Richard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal and plant ecology; Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Applied ecology; Biological and medical sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomonitoring; Conservation, protection and management of environment and wildlife; Ecology; Environmental monitoring; Freshwater & Marine Ecology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects; Introduced species; Invertebrates; Life Sciences; Macroinvertebrates; Nonnative species; Pollution monitoring; Primary Research Paper; Relative abundance; Research methodology; Rivers; Synecology; Water monitoring; Water quality; Water quality management; Zoology
• ISSN: 0018-8158; 1573-5117
• DOI: 10.1007/s10750-009-0037-x

Freshwater invasive or alien species (IAS) can have a major impact on benthic macroinvertebrate assemblage structure and diversity. This has implications for accurate biological monitoring, the assessment of the ecological quality status of rivers and achievement of Water Framework Directive (WFD) objectives. Although IAS constitutes a major biological pressure to WFD objectives, current approaches to ecological status assessment tend to ignore their presence. This problem is compounded as biotic indices such as the Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP) score do not distinguish between native and IAS, when IAS tend to be more tolerant of organic pollution than the natives they replace. Biocontamination is the presence of an IAS in a system, and we tested a new method of biocontamination assessment, designed to be used alongside current routine water quality monitoring techniques, by applying it to biological monitoring data from the river monitoring programme of a small Island, The Isle of Man. Although 54% of monitoring sites exhibited no biocontamination, 19% showed low or moderate biocontamination and 27% high or severe biocontamination. Richness contamination was low (only two contaminated families being recorded), but abundance contamination was high in some sites (87% of individuals being IAS). Sites with a greater relative abundance of IAS individuals exhibited lower BMWP water quality. Within invaded sites BMWP monitoring was not responsive to changing chemical water quality, whereas within uninvaded sites it was. In invaded sites, the relative abundance of IAS increased as ammonia and BOD₅ increased. Our study shows current monitoring approaches mask the presence of AIS within assemblages, with some highly biocontaminated sites registering high BMWP biological quality. This new index represents a simple way to integrate the IAS biological pressure into established WFD monitoring programmes, to produce more comprehensive estimates of ecological quality status than are currently being realised.