Suficiência taxonômica, resolução numérica e grupos substitutos: uma análise para a comunidade fitoplanctônica de ambiente lótico

• Autor(a) principal: CARNEIRO, Fernanda Melo
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tde/2578
• topic: fitoplâncton, resolução taxonômica, resolução numérica, grupos funcionais; phytoplankton, taxonomic resolution, numeric resolution, functional groups; CNPQ::CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::ECOLOGIA

Classification systems are necessary to organize the huge complexity of biological systems. Frequently, these systems are useful to studies focusing on environmental monitoring, conservation plans and biodiversity assessments. Studies on phytoplankton ecology are, in general, conducted with the identification of organisms up to the species level. This is a costly, laborious and complex task that demands experienced biologists. However, for some purposes, higher taxonomic levels may be enough, mainly when main trends are identified by either data at low or higher resolution (taxonomic and numeric). In this study, it was evaluated if the temporal trajectories described by a lotic phytoplankton community, which were first summarized by an ordination technique, were dependent or not on the taxonomic/numerical resolution used to represent the data. The phytoplankton classification system in functional groups was also contrasted against simple taxonomic classifications in order to verify if they really offer distinct patterns of ordination. Procrustean analyses indicated that patterns of ordination generated by incidence data of genus were significantly concordant with the patterns generated by density of species. Temporal trajectories of scores derived from functional groups significantly matched those derived from analyses based on the quantitative data (density or biovolume) of genus or family. Thus, at least for the system investigated here, the complexities associated with this classification criterion may be unwarranted. In general, the results indicated that some simplifications were justifiable, mainly when one takes into account the need of uninterrupted biomonitoring programs over large spatial scales in a continental-sized country, with increasing environmental problems, and with a paucity of scientists