New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research abstracts
SQMCI: a biotic index
for freshwater macroinvertebrate coded-abundance data
JOHN D. STARK
Cawthron Institute
Private Bag 2
Nelson, New Zealand
Abstract A new freshwater macroinvertebrate-based biotic
index derived from the Quantitative Macroinvertebrate Community Index (QMCI) is
proposed for use with coded-abundance data collected from stony New Zealand
streams using hand nets. The SQMCI (Semi-Quantitative MCI) responds to changes
in community dominance in a similar manner to the QMCI, but requires fewer
replicate samples to achieve the same precision. In situations where
macroinvertebrate densities are not required, the SQMCI provides a similar
assessment to the QMCI with less than 40% of the effort, thus reducing the cost
and/or improving the scientific defensibility of biomonitoring programmes.
Variability of biotic indices must be known to enable detection of significant
differences in water quality between streams, at different sites in the same
stream, or between times at the same site. Best estimates of MCI and QMCI
standard deviations have been updated, and newly derived for the SQMCI, for use
in two statistical procedures for testing for significant differences between
paired index values.
Keywords benthic invertebrates; aquatic insects; sampling;
biotic indices; biological monitoring
New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 1998, Vol. 32:
55-66
0028-8330/98/3201-0055 $7.00/0 (c) The Royal Society of New Zealand
1998
PDF file of entire paper: medium quality (962K); (scanned from paper original: notes about this process)
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