Research paperCommunity concordance in lotic ecosystems: How to establish unbiased congruence between macroinvertebrate and fish communities

- Community concordance is affected by data variability.
- The Chironomidae family reinforces congruence with the fish community.
- High taxonomic resolution and wide environmental gradients increase the concordance.

Community concordance within aquatic biota could provide useful information for improving the methods used in bioassessment and biodiversity conservation management. The main goal of the study was to investigate the mechanism of community concordance between macroinvertebrates and fish in a single river basin (South Morava river Basin, Serbia). In order to achieve this, a Self organizing map (SOM) ordinated and classified sampling sites based on the community structures of five different taxa groups (macroinveretbrates (MIB), fish (FSH), Chironomidae (CHI), Macroinvertebrates without Chironomidae (MWC) and the Ephemeroptera Plecoptera Trichioptera group (EPT)). SOM also revealed 6 environmental gradients along the groups tested that significantly changed their community structures. Using the results of the SOM analysis as the input, the Mantel test quantified the highest community concordance between FSH and MIB (r = 0.42) followed by FSH and CHI (r = 0.29). The lowest concordance was recorded between FSH and EPT (r = 0.14). The indicator species analysis (IndVal) revealed 39 species to be responsible for the community patterns obtained. The Geo-SOM visualized the spatial distribution of the IndVal taxa, revealing the generators of community concordance. The strength of community concordance depends on the variability of the data on the aquatic biota. Thus, having an appropriate sampling and statistical design as well as high taxonomic resolution, as some of the factors which increase the variability in the data set, could present community concordance between fish and macroinvertebrates in an unbiased way.