Leaving the beaten track - Approaches beyond the Venice System to classify estuarine waters according to salinity

The Venice System is one of the best-known and most applied systems to classify waters with respect to salinity. It has often been subject to criticism because the criteria used to derive zone boundaries were not made explicit. Consequently, an alternative multivariate PCA method that aimed at identifying salinity zones by means of the salinity ranges preferred by species was introduced by Bulger et al. (1993). We tested the applicability of both methods using salinity and benthic macroinvertebrate data for the poikilohaline Elbe Estuary (Germany) from 1997 to 2012. This was done by comparing the resultant salinity zone limits from the two approaches with boundaries where significant community changes were found by means of cluster analysis. Only the Venice System polyhaline and limnetic zone boundaries, and the PCA method outer estuary zone limit, showed good agreement with the benthic community pattern. None of the other Venice System or PCA method zone limits reflected the benthic community patterns. Our findings suggest that zone limits can only be well determined from mean salinity at the inner and outer end of the estuary, where the variation of salinity is relatively low. In contrast, in the middle of the estuary variation in salinity is the better predictor of zone boundaries. Thus, application of the Venice System or the PCA method in poikilohaline estuaries, such as the Elbe, is not meaningful and their use should be limited to homoiohaline systems. For poikilohaline systems, we found cluster analysis to be a better tool to identify salinity-zone boundaries.