Abstract
We present the concept of assemblage tolerance profiles (ATPs) as an aid to freshwater bioassessment, and illustrate it with a practical example. An ATP describes the proportion of taxa in an observed assemblage that is estimated to tolerate each level of a specific stressor within a defined range. We used an extensive compilation of biomonitoring field data to estimate the lower tolerances for pH and dissolved oxygen (DO) of common families of macroinvertebrates in rivers of south-eastern Australia. These limits were then used to establish ATPs for macroinvertebrate assemblages at 30 sites across six river systems with varying levels of exposure to drainage from disused mines and discharges from sewage treatment plants. We hypothesised that sites with more exposure to mine drainage would have ATPs indicating greater tolerance of low pH, whereas sites with more exposure to sewage discharges would have ATPs indicating greater tolerance of low DO, and found that these hypotheses were confirmed for five of the six river systems. We suggest that stressor-specific ATPs, based on tolerances derived from either field distributions or laboratory tests, can help to verify or eliminate candidate causes of inferred human impacts on aquatic ecosystems.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the many people who produced the monitoring data from which tolerances were derived, including staff of the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, its predecessor agencies and the following partner organisations and service providers: the Australian Water Quality Centre, the eWater Cooperative Research Centre, Ecowise Environmental, the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, the South Australian Environment Protection Authority, the Victorian Environment Protection Authority, Water Ecoscience, the former Water Science Laboratories and Water’s Edge Consulting. We thank the following people for providing data sets and other information: Susan Nichols (eWater Co-operative Research Centre); Greg Long and Alison Reardon (Murray–Darling Basin Authority); Sonia Claus, Jan Miller, Chris Rush and Eren Turak (NSW Office of Environment and Heritage); Monika Muschal (NSW Office of Water); Minal Khan (Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management); Peter Goonan (South Australian Environment Protection Authority) and Lisa Singleton (Victorian Environment Protection Authority). The manuscript was improved through helpful comments from anonymous referees.
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Chessman, B.C., McEvoy, P.K. Insights into Human Impacts on Streams from Tolerance Profiles of Macroinvertebrate Assemblages. Water Air Soil Pollut 223, 1343–1352 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-011-0949-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11270-011-0949-8