Aquatic macroinvertebrate community patterns as a tool prioritization of River Basin Specific Pollutants

Abstract

This study was carried out to identify relations between the macroinvertebrate communities and River Basin Specific pollutants (RBS pollutants) in the Danube River. The investigation was performed on 68 sites along 2,500km of the Danube. Forward Selection (FS) method, Canonical Correspondence Analyses (CCA) and the Spearman correlation coefficient (SC) were used to identify the relations between macroinvertebrate dataset and selected biological metrics and RBS pollutants. Out of 20 analysed pollutants, seven (2,4-Dinitrophenol, Chloroxuron, Bromacil, Dimefuron, Amoxicillin, Bentazon and Fluoranthene) were found to be significantly correlated with macroinvertebrate communities. Bentazon, Dimefuron, 2,4-Dinitrophenol, Fluoranthene and Chloroxuron showed negative correlation with total number of taxa and abundance of Trichoptera, Diptera, Oligochaeta, Crustacea and Odonata, as well as abundance of Gastropoda and total number of taxa. To find synergistic influence of RBS pollutants on biota, BIO-ENV analysis was performed and reviled that 3 subsets of environmental variables were highly correlated with biota resemblance matrix, covering combination of same parameters singled out by FA.