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Development of a Multimetric Indicator of Pelagic Zooplankton Assemblage Condition for the 2012 National Lakes Assessment
Citation:
Peck, D., A. Pollard, AND K. Blocksom. Development of a Multimetric Indicator of Pelagic Zooplankton Assemblage Condition for the 2012 National Lakes Assessment. N. AMer Lake Mgmt. Soc.(NALMS) 36th International Symposium, Banff, AB, CANADA, November 01 - 04, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Using zooplankton assemblage data from the 2012 National Lakes Assessment (NLA), we developed and evaluated the performance of regional-scale multimetric indicators (MMIs) that were responsive to disturbance and repeatable. The performance of the MMIs were sufficient to allow for the assessment of biological condition in lakes and reservoirs sampled during the 2012 NLA. This effort represents one of the few cases where zooplankton have been used for bioassessment in either the USA or in Europe. The MMIs appear to respond more strongly to increased nutrient concentrations than to shoreline habitat conditions. Improving our understanding of how zooplankton assemblages respond to increased human disturbance, and obtaining more complete autecological information for zooplankton taxa would likely improve MMIs developed for future assessments. This abstract supports SSWR 3.01.
Description:
We used zooplankton data collected for the 2012 National Lakes Assessment (NLA) to develop multimetric indices (MMIs) for five aggregated ecoregions of the conterminous USA (Coastal Plains, Eastern Highlands, Plains, Upper Midwest, and Western Mountains and Xeric [“West’]). We classified candidate metrics into six categories: We evaluated the performance of candidate metrics, and used metrics that had passed these screens to calculate all possible candidate MMIs that included at least one metric from each category. We selected the candidate MMI that had high responsiveness, a reasonable value for repeatability, low mean pairwise correlation among component metrics, and, when possible, a maximum pairwise correlation among component metrics that was <0.7. We were able to develop MMIs that were sufficiently responsive and repeatable to assess ecological condition for the NLA without the need to reduce the effects of natural variation using models. We did not observe effects of either lake size, lake origin, or site depth on the MMIs. The MMIs appear to respond more strongly to increased nutrient concentrations than to shoreline habitat conditions. Improving our understanding of how zooplankton assemblages respond to increased human disturbance, and obtaining more complete autecological information for zooplankton taxa would likely improve MMIs developed for future assessments.