Dear Salman,
its imortant to know their raoid response to enivronmental change, and wide geographic distrbution.
I prefer to read chapter 3 in freshwater algae by E.G. Bellinger and D.C. Sigee (2010)
yes absolutely. chapter 3 demonstrate every queries of estimating algae indices in lotic and lentic water bodies. I follow the same.
Some of algae found in polluted water, hence it has ability to grow..
Such as some Nitzschia and euglena indicates to organic pollution.
Common criteria for selection:
Selection of appropriate biomonitoring organism
Taking into account that the preferable candidate as a monitoring object in
freshwater ecosystems should possess the following useful features:
■ to be present throughout the monitored ecosystem in fairly abundant numbers
and throughout the year, especially prior and after the point source of pollution;
■ to react swiftly, either at the individual or population level, on the detected
pollution pressure;
■ to have high accumulation capacities, or to show statistically significant
correlation to ambient concentration of the polluters;
■ to be sensitive to as many as possible environmental factors;
■ to be easy to collect and name at species level;
■ its collection and manipulation not to represent an ethical or biodiversity
obstacle.
Algae are bioindicators of both structural components of ecological integrity (taxonomic composition) and functional integrity (biomass, rates, pattern and relative importance of processes).
Despite the equal treatment of diatoms and soft-bodied (i.e. non-diatom) algae in the “saprobic system”, diatoms have received increasing attention in the past century due to their easy use as bioindicators (reviewed by Stevenson et al., 2010; Whitton, 2013). The current state-of-art in algae-based river and stream bioassessment in the EU shows that the diatoms are developed and intercalibrated as proxies for phytobenthos, gradually narrowed to an application of a few diatom indices (Poikane, 2015). The soft-bodied algae supplement either phytobentos or macrophyte stream assessment systems in several states, and the abundance of the phytobentos is not evaluated (Kelly, 2013; Poikane, 2015).
Several studies (e.g., Lavoie et al., 2004; Kelly et al., 2008; Potapova and Carlisle, 2011) have showed that soft-bodied algae did not improve stressor responsiveness of diatoms alone, but they were based on taxonomy methods that allowed mainly genus-level or coarser identifications of soft-bodied algae which may account for the conclusions. In contrast, studies designed to explore the full potential of soft-bodied algae demonstrated that they enhance bioassessment power along the following lines of consideration: (1) multimetric indices based on entire algal communities, that is expected to exhibit better responsiveness to anthropogenic stressors over indices based either on diatoms or soft-bodied algae assemblages alone (Fetscher et al., 2014); (2) the best performing soft-bodied algal index exhibited greater discriminatory power than its diatom counterpart near the higher end of the range of anthropogenic disturbance (Fetscher et al., 2014); (3) differences in diatom and soft-bodied algal biotic indices may be detected depending on ecosystems subject to environmental change; these differences could provide indications related to ecosystem stability (Schneider et al., 2012); (4) diatom and soft-bodied algal communities respond to nutrient supply and pH differently, with diatom taxon richness generally increasing with nutrient availability in contrast to decreasing soft-bodied algae richness (Schneider et al., 2013); (5) diatoms in conjunction with soft-bodied algae provide a more robust assessment of nutrient conditions, inferring nitrogen (N) limitation in 20% more sites than monitoring with either algal group alone (Stancheva et al., 2013b).
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