engleski

Concordance of Diptera taxa with different groups of freshwater biota in lotic systems

Community concordance is a degree to which different taxa groups of freshwater biota similarly respond to different environmental gradients. Due to identification problem, Diptera taxa have been excluded from community concordance studies, or applied with poor taxonomic resolution. The main objective of this study was to test the distributional concordance of Diptera taxa with other freshwater taxa along the longitudinal gradient of lotic systems. Furthermore, we wanted to define the concordant taxa groups for lotic habitats with different levels of water quality. The Artificial neural network (Self-organizing map (SOM)) was used to ordinate and classify macroinvertebrate and fish taxa with similar distributional patterns, sampled along the Southern Morava river basin. The SOM obtained four groups of neurons with concordant taxa. Group A was consisted of 31 taxa mainly from Chironomidae group. Representatives of cluster A were distributed in most polluted sites. Group B were presented with 28 taxa distributed at moderately polluted sites. Group C was presented with 65 taxa from habitats with high water quality. Finally, group D was consisted of 113 taxa without specific distributional pattern. Diptera group presents one of the most dominant and frequent groups within hydrobiocoenoses and has to be included in all biodiversity and bioassessment studies.

Diptera taxa; community concordance; lotic system; Self-organizing map

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