Quantifying the responses of biological indices to rare macroinvertebrate taxa exclusion: Does excluding more rare taxa cause more error?

Abstract

Including or excluding rare taxa in bioassessment is a controversial topic, which essentially affects the reliability and accuracy of the result. In the present paper, we hypothesize that biological indices such as Shannon-Wiener index, Simpson's index, Margalef index, evenness, BMWP (biological monitoring working party), and ASPT (Average Score Per Taxon) respond differently to rare taxa exclusion. To test this hypothesis, a benthic macroinvertebrate data set based on recent fifteen-year studies in China was built for suppositional plot analyses. A field research was conducted in the Nansi Lake to perform related analyses. The results of suppositional plot simulations showed that Simpson's index placed more weight on common taxa than any other studied indices, followed by Shannon-Wiener index which remained a high value with the exclusion of rare taxa. The results indicated that there was not much of effect on Simpson's index and Shannon-Wiener index when rare taxa were excluded. Rare taxa played an important role in Margalef index and BMWP than in other indices. Evenness showed an increase trend, while ASPT varied inconsistently with the exclusion of rare taxa. Results of the field study also indicated that rare taxa had few impacts on the Shannon-Wiener index. By examining the relationships between the rare taxa and biological indices in our study, it is suggested that including the rare taxa when using BMWP and excluding them in the proposed way (e.g., fixed-count subsampling) to calculate Shannon-Wiener index and Simpson's index could raise the efficiency and reduce the biases in the bioassessment of freshwater ecosystems.

Impacts of an Amazonian hydroelectric dam on frog assemblages

“…These analyses were used with the complete assemblage (96 species) but rare species could represent a source of noise in multivariate analyses and thus prevent the detection of patterns of assemblage structure [ 51 ] and some studies have not included them in the analyses [ 52 , 53 ]. Rarity is subjective, but we wanted to know whether patterns for species with few records in our sample were similar to those for more common species [ 52 , 54 ].…”

Biodiversity and temporal patterns of macrozoobenthos in a coal mining subsidence area in North China

“…1). Shandong Province’s climate is typical temperate monsoon climate characterized by hot and rainy summers and cold and dry winters, with an average annual precipitation of 600 mm and a mean temperature between 13.5 and 15 °C (Yu et al, 2017). Rapid economic development and a considerable increase in population have triggered the evident expansion of urban areas in China, including Yanzhou City was no exception.…”

Sampling effort and information quality provided by rare and common species in estimating assemblage structure

“…This is because individuals are sampled haphazardly and, on average, the estimated relative abundances of species are close to those observed in nature (Marchant, 2002). Moreover, although some rare species are not detected, these species may have a minor weight in the analyses of assemblages (Yu et al, 2017), particularly for dissimilarity indices based on abundance data (Marchant, 2002;Draper et al, 2019). Accordingly, reduced sample sizes may be enough to estimate common species and, thus, properly reflect compositional resemblance between assemblages (Cao and Hawkins, 2005;Legendre and Legendre, 2012).…”

“…The estimation of resemblance between assemblages using either rare or common species has been a controversial issue among ecologists (Cao et al, 1998;Marchant, 2002;Poos and Jackson, 2012;Yu et al, 2017), although the use of only one of them may have some methodological advantages. For example, low sampling effort is sufficient to detect common species and correctly estimate their relative abundances.…”