Abstract
Human activities have impacted many environments on earth, and thus several species are facing an increased risk of extinction. The environmental crisis requires rapid tools to assess the ecosystem health accurately. Studies have been conducted with visual indices that quantify habitat integrity by predicting species richness and diversity. However, whether a diverse clade can predict habitat integrity has not been used. The genus Argia (Rambur, 1842) is one of the most locally diverse groups in southeastern Mexico. In this context, we hypothesized that the occurrence, species richness, and diversity of adults Argia spp. could be a better predictor of the Visual-Based Habitat Assessment Score (VBHAS) than the other taxonomic levels or less diverse clades. We found that the richness and diversity of Argia spp. are positively correlated with VBHA scores, as same as taxonomic ratios. Simultaneously, VBHA scores increase to 23.51 times when Argia spp. diversity increases. We discuss the possible use of a diverse Odonata clade, as Argia spp. could surrogate habitat integrity for local long-term biomonitoring programs. This approach requires testing with other indices and verifying a reliable and consistent relationship between diverse clades and environmental assessment scores.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) and the Mexican Water Council (CONAGUA) for funding this research. Thanks also go to Keith MacMillan, George Damoff, Felicia Line, and Francisca Méndez-Harclerode for linguistic corrections and all those who helped us during field collections and with species identification in the laboratory: Daniel Alberto Martínez, Maricela Gómez Cristiani, Artemio González, Rocío B. Gómez Gutiérrez, Diego López, and Mario López. We want to thank the editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers who improve the original manuscript through a productive discussion during the peer-review process. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Jorge Tolosa and Amalia Mendoza.
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This work was supported by the CONAGUA-CONACYT under 18 months’ master’s grant for thesis number 2010–02- agreement 148109, for María Gómez-Tolosa.
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Conceptualization: MGT, EGS, SL. Methodology: MGT, SL. Formal analysis and investigation: MGT, EGS, LFMC, SL. Writing-original draft preparation: MGT, SL. Writing-review and editing: EGS, LFMC, RMPM, TMRP, HOS, GRV, FEPG. Funding acquisition: EEEM. Resources and supervision: EGS, LFMC, SL. Software and visualization: MGT, SL.
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Gómez-Tolosa, M., González-Soriano, E., Mendoza-Cuenca, L.F. et al. The use of highly diverse clades as a surrogate for habitat integrity analysis: Argia damselflies as a practical tool for rapid assessments. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 24334–24347 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-18815-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-18815-w