Four indices used in the UK for monitoring freshwater benthic macroinvertebrates, which may be new to you are: LIFE (Lotic-invertebrate Index for Flow Evaluation), CCI (Community Conservation Index), PSI (Proportion of Sediment-sensitive Invertebrates) and AWIC (Acid Water Indicator Community). The first three have been developed by colleagues of mine, Dr Chris Extence and Richard Chadd. LIFE is a metric that monitors changes in invertebrate communities to prevailing flow regimes, which from studying hydroecological relationships may allow ecologically minded flow targets to be set for rivers. CCI is a conservation index that accounts for both community richness and species rarity. PSI uses the invertebrate as a proxy to give an indication of fine silt cover. AWIC is an index used for detecting acidification in British streams.

Hope this is useful?

Kind regards,

Drew.

Thank you so much Dear Drew Constable;

may i get the sample of these indices or software please

I have sent you an email with some information about some of these.

Hi Drew,

I am currently carrying out a project with ZSL for my masters thesis in Aquatic Resource Management at King's College and am looking to develop an index appropriate for detecting pollution events in urban rivers. Would it be possible for you to send me some more information about the indices you have spoken about above?

Many thanks for any help that you may be able to provide with this,

Kind regards,

Rosanna

[email protected]

Hi Rosanna,

Sure thing will email the information to you tomorrow. I assume you are aware of the BMWP scoring system primarily used for detecting organic pollution events. One current shortfall in this method is that it fails to utilise abundances, although this soon will be superseded by the WHPT index which will have pressure sensitivity scores for each scoring family linked to abundance categories.

Kind regards,

Drew.

For fine sediments there is also the coFSI (Murphy et al, 2015). We have just begun a PhD project to test the response of fine sediment indices using a novel technique for quantifying the intrusion of fines into gravel beds, building on work done by QMUL, University of Brighton and the Environment agency. We are also working on a trait-based analyses of stress responses by stream invertebrates.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/fwb.12627/abstract