Predictive Modeling of Biological Communities in Biomonitoring Network: Case Study of ARROW Project of WFD EU Implementation in the Czech Republic
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | 6th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Ecology |
| Keywords | environmental monitoring; WFD EU; predictive modelling; RIVPACS |
| Description | The project ARROW (Assessment and Reference Reports of Water monitoring - http://www.cba.muni.cz/arrow/eng) is focused on the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive in the monitoring of surface waters of the Czech Republic. The evaluation of ecological state of surface waters according to WFD EU depends on the methodology of analysis of biological communities. There are two main approaches with its own disadvantages and advantages which are thus combined in our system i) type specific approach with prediction of comprehensive indices in abiotic types of localities and ii) site specific predictive modeling of biological communities composition on which our paper is focused. The predictive modeling of the benthic macroinvertebrates could be considered as RIVPACS type model and works with well validated environmental gradient comprising both reference and contaminated (standard) sites. The methodology contains identification of indicative species and their relationship to stressors, clustering algorithms and evaluation of the optimal set of clusters (i.e. reference types) for reference biological communities and newly developed robust classification of standard localities into reference types. The information on classification probabilities together with reference biological communities composition are used as input for probabilistic modeling of expected biological communities and the comparison between expected and observed state is used in computation of the final multi-metric evaluation of ecological state. The presented approach is compatible with the EU Water Framework Directive and is implemented in the national-wide information system supported with GIS-oriented analytic software. The presentation is documented by model outputs from more than 300 reference and more than 300 standard sites with regular seasonal sampling of benthic macroinvertebrates communities (approximately 2000 samples). The methodology will be presented as rather universal approach that could be also adopted for the other types of biological communities. The project is supported by the Ministry of Environment of the Czech Republic (project ARROW) and by project INCHEMBIOL (MSM0021622412). |
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