Calibration and evaluation of five indicators of benthic community condition in two California bay and estuary habitats

Effect of ecological group classification schemes on performance of the AMBI benthic index in US coastal waters

“…These pre-existing datasets had previously been used in the creation and validation of regional benthic indices in southern California (Weisberg et al, 2008;Ranasinghe et al, 2009), the southeast US (North Carolina to northern Florida) Van Dolah et al, 1999) and the Mid-Atlantic (Llansó et al, 2002a,b;Llansó et al, 2002a,b) ( Table 2). These datasets were selected because: (1) each had an associated benthic index that has been peer-reviewed and in use (2) each had a series of a priori defined good/bad sites used in validating their respective benthic index; (3) each had sediment chemistry, organic matter content, grainsize, and waterquality data associated with benthic macrofaunal data; and (4) the datasets were readily available for use with little data management.…”

“…In lieu of comparing index scores along any single stressor gradient, accuracy in diagnosing condition was evaluated by measuring the condition agreement of each EG iteration with good and bad sites that had previously been used to calibrate/validate each of the local regional indices Llansó et al, 2002b;Ranasinghe et al, 2009). A description of the stressor and reference gradients used to quantify these validation/ calibration sites is presented in Table 1.…”

Performance comparison of biotic indices measuring the ecological status base on soft-bottom macroinvertebrates: a study along the shallow Gomishan lagoon (Southeast Caspian Sea)

“…Many researchers (LABRUNE et al, 2006;BLANCHET et al, 2008;BAKALEM et al, 2009;DAUVIN et al, 2009;GRÉMARE et al, 2009;RANASINGHE et al, 2009) have highlighted the differences in assessments produced by the various benthic indicators. These differences are caused by several things, in particular by the fact that the indicators do not use the same method for species classification (e.g., the AMBI classifies species into Ecological Groups following PEARSON and ROSENBERG's concept.…”

Is there a possibility of ranking benthic quality assessment indices to select the most responsive to different human pressures?

“…As commented by Borja et al (2014), as these indices are able to reproduce the experience of experts in interpreting benthic data using a repeatable tool, they constitute a benchmark to classify sites with levels of correlation and accuracy comparable to that amongst experts (Ranasinghe et al, 2009). In fact, it seems that these indices encapsulate expert knowledge into a single value, which makes benthic assessment comparable across geographies .…”

“…Such a response can be assessed using benthic indices, and its performance has been compared in different countries, for example, in the USA (Ranasinghe et al, 2002(Ranasinghe et al, , 2009Borja et al, 2008b;Benyi et al, 2009;Gillett et al, 2015) or Europe (Grémare et al, 2009;Pinto et al, 2009;Simboura and Argyrou, 2010;Veríssimo et al, 2012). In some geographical areas, for example, in Europe, legislation mandates the intercalibration of assessment methods (Borja et al, 2007(Borja et al, , 2009; Simboura and Reizopoulou, 2008).…”