The relationship between river basin specific (RBS) pollutants and macroinvertebrate communities

Abstract

This study was carried out to identify the relations between macroinvertebrate communities and river basin specific (RBS) pollutants in the Danube River. The investigation was performed at 68 sites along 2,500 km of the Danube. Forward selection (FS), canonical correspondence analyses (CCA), the Spearman correlation coefficient (SC) and BIO-ENV analysis (to detect synergistic effects) were used to identify the relations between the macroinvertebrate dataset and selected biological metrics with RBS pollutants. Of the 20 analysed pollutants (preselected based on NORMAN network methodology), seven (2,4-dinitrophenol, chloroxuron, bromacil, dimefuron, amoxicillin, bentazon and fluoranthene) were found to significantly correlate with macroinvertebrate communities. BIO-ENV analysis revealed 3 subsets of environmental variables that were in high correlation with the biota resemblance matrix, consisting mainly of a combination of the above-mentioned pollutants. Our results indicate that there are significant correlations between chemical determinants and aquatic biota. Moreover, this study contributes to the validation of the methodology used for prioritization of RBS pollutants proposed by the NORMAN network.