Assessing the biological quality of fresh waters: RIVPACS and other techniques

By J. F. Wright, David W. Sutcliffe, Patrick D. Armitage. 2000

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

RIVPACS has been used successfully for biological assessment of river water quality but its potential in forecasting the effects of environmental change has not been investigated. This study has shown that it is possible to simulate faunal changes in response to environmental disturbance, provided that the disturbance directly involves the environmental variables used in RIVPACS predictions. These variables relate to channel shape, discharge and substratum. Many impacts, particularly those associated with pollution, will not affect these variables and therefore RIVPACS cannot simulate the effects of pollution. RIVPACS was sensitive only to major changes in substratum. It was concluded that, because of the static nature of RIVPACS, it cannot respond to the dynamic effects and processes associated with environmental disturbance. Thus RIVPACS, while showing direction of change and indicating sensitive taxa, cannot be used to predict or forecast the effects of environmental impacts.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/791fe5c4ca905a9406c57c72899f7ee2e94a0039

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Effects of sampling error on bioassessments of stream ecosystems: application to RIVPACS-type models (2004, methodology): “Much progress has been made in the last 2 decades in developing techniques that measure the ecological health, or biological integrity, of stream ecosystems (Karr 1981, Norris and Hawkins 2000, Wright et al. 2000).”
A Species‐Specific Approach to Modeling Biological Communities and Its Potential for Conservation (2003, background): “This approach would be similar to those of many biomonitoring programs (e.g., Wright et al. 2000), but it would have the distinct advantage of predicting community composition and not merely the total number of species.”
GLOBIO-Aquatic, a global model of human impact on the biodiversity of inland aquatic ecosystems (2015, methodology): “The IBI method has been further developed and (regionally) adapted for many different ecosystems and biotic groups (Karr and Chu, 2000; Wright et al., 2000; Parsons et al., 2002), with varying number and nature of metrics.”
PLOCH: a standardized method for sampling and assessing the biodiversity in ponds (2005, methodology): “As for other methods of invertebrate survey in fresh waters (e.g. AFNOR, 1992; Biggs et al., 2000a; Wright et al., 2000), sampling was stratified across the dominant mesohabitats.”
Taxonomic sufficiency: The influence of taxonomic resolution on freshwater bioassessments using benthic macroinvertebrates (2008, unknown): “…axis-scores (Anderson and Willis 2003) or pair-wise similarity or distance measures (such as Jaccard’s Coefficient and Bray-Curtis Distance), and a variety of statistical methods are used to investigate ecological patterns (e.g., Norris and Georges 1993; Wright et al. 2000; Bailey et al. 2004).”
Invertebrate traits for the biomonitoring of large European rivers: an initial assessment of alternative metrics (2003, background): “The spatial expansion of these tools creates the need to redefine or rescale them for many different regions (Wright et al., 2000; Buffagni et al., 2001).”
Predicting the species richness of aquatic insects in streams using a limited number of environmental variables (2003, background): “Such approaches to river bioassessment were recently developed in Europe (e.g., River Invertebrate Prediction and Classification System), Australia (Australian River Assessment System), and Canada (Benthic Assessment of Sediment) (reviewed in Wright et al. 2000).”