15 gen. 2019 - Alex Laini

biomonitoR: an R package for calculating biomonitoring indices of running waters

Presenta: Alex Laini

Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, University of Parma

Biomonitoring is crucial to assess and preserve the quality status of running waters. Following the implementation of Water Framework Directive, a multitude of indices has been developed targeting at the effects of different stressors on aquatic communities. However, the application of those indices is generally confined within the country in which they are developed, making the sharing of methods among researchers difficult. Our work aims to cover this gap by developing a package called biomonitoR for the free statistical software R.
The indices developed until now encompass different features of biotic communities such as diversity and evenness, sensitivity to stressors and functional indices based on fuzzy-coded biological and ecological traits. biomonitoR is still in development but is already downloadable (https://github.com/alexology/biomonitoR/) and testable. This project it is based upon work from COST Action CA15113 (SMIRES, Science and Management of Intermittent Rivers and Ephemeral Streams, www.smires.eu) supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

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