Development of a Metric of Aquatic Invertebrates for Volunteers (MAIV): A Simple and Friendly Biotic Metric to Assess Ecological Quality of Streams

Abstract

Citizen science activities, involving local people in volunteer-supported and sustainable monitoring programs, are common. In this context, the objective of the present work was to develop a simple Metric of Aquatic Invertebrates for Volunteers (MAIV), including a user-friendly tool that can be easily accessed by volunteers, and to evaluate the efficiency of a volunteer monitoring program following an audit procedure. To obtain MAIV values, macroinvertebrate communities were reduced to 18 surrogate taxa, which represented an acceptable compromise between simplicity, efficiency, and reproducibility of the data, compared to the regular Water Framework Directive monitoring. When compared to results obtained with the National Classification System of Portugal, MAIV accurately detected moderate, poor, and bad ecological status. Thus, MAIV can be used by volunteers as a complement to the official monitoring program, as well as a prospective early warning tool for local problems related to ecological quality. Volunteers were students supervised by their teachers. Results obtained by volunteers were compared to results obtained by experts on macroinvertebrate identification to measure the efficiency of the procedure, by counting gains and losses on sorting, and identification. Characteristics of groups of volunteers (age and school level) did not influence significantly the efficiency of the procedure, and generally results of volunteers and experts matched.