Definition Procedures Have Little Effect on Performance of Environmental Classifications of Streams and Rivers |
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Authors: | Ton H Snelder Hervé Pella Jean-Gabriel Wasson Nicolas Lamouroux |
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Institution: | (1) Biologie des Ecosystèmes Aquatiques, CEMAGREF, Lyon, France |
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Abstract: | Mapped environmental classifications are defined using various procedures, but there has been little evaluation of the differences
in their ability to discriminate variation in independent ecological characteristics. We tested the performance of environmental
classifications of the streams and rivers of France that had been defined from the same environmental data using geographic
regionalization and numerical classification of individual river valley segments. Test data comprised invertebrate assemblages,
water chemistry, and hydrological indexes obtained from sites throughout France. Classification performance was measured by
analysis of similarity (ANOSIM). Geometric regions defined by a regular grid and without regard to environmental variables
and a posteriori classifications based on clustering the test datasets defined lower and upper bounds of performance for a
given number of classes. Differences in classification performances were generally small. The ANOSIM statistics for the a
posteriori classifications were around twice that of all environmental classifications, including geometrically defined regions.
The hydro-ecoregions performed slightly better for the invertebrate data and the network classification performed slightly
better for the chemistry and hydrological data. Our results indicate that environmental classifications that are defined using
different procedures can be comparable in terms of their ability to discriminate variation of ecological characteristics and
that alleged differences in performance arising from different classification procedures can be small relative to unexplained
variation. We conclude that definition procedures might have little effect on the performance of large-scale environmental
classifications and decisions over which procedures to use should be based primarily on pragmatic considerations. |
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Keywords: | Rivers Streams Invertebrates Hydrology Chemistry Environmental Classification Watershed Ecoregion ANOSIM Bootstrap |
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