Implementation of Data Sources for Analysis of Obligatory Level of Taxa Determination for Routine Biomonitoring

Abstract

Although taxonomy or generally biological determination is unavoidable indication component in most of ecological risk assessment studies, its implementation in standard methodical guidelines is often limited by complicated structure of biological communities. The species richness thus increases cost of the determination as well as requirements for experts and time. Our aim here is to document feasibility of optimizing reduction of taxonomic units that are necessary to guarantee still representative and safe scenario of risk assessment studies. This analysis should ensure i) acquisition of information on relationship between the communities and their environment, ii) decreased time and financial costs paid for taxonomic determination, iii) prevention of wrong determination with no relevance to the assessed situation. The proposed environmentally-oriented scoring of taxa consists of two steps, both requires also experts from given biological field and therefore are community-specific. First of all, the index of determination quality and the index of taxon indicative power are computed over reference data set. In the second step, the analysis of valences, similarity of species traits and joint occurrence of species are used for their aggregation in taxonomic tree where we can easily find the proper “cut-off” levels. Proper taxonomic level should be characterized by low demand on determination, however accompanied with still clear association with environmental conditions. The proposed scoring of macrozoobenthos taxa was tested over the dataset of more than 600 reference and contaminated sites. The data sources for analysis are databases of the Czech national information systems storing long-term environmental monitoring data. The results will be incorporated in the standard biomonitoring network of the Czech Republic according to implementation rules of WFD EU.