Centro de Oceanografia, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal.
Mar Pollut Bull. 2011 May;62(5):992-1001. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2011.02.037. Epub 2011 Mar 10.
The importance of establishing the ecological quality of estuarine systems has been widely acknowledged and led to the development of several fish community-based multimetric indices. Nevertheless, a question rose about the accuracy of these tools when natural disturbance is acting upon the organization of the systems' communities. Four multimetric indices were used to examine their ability to differentiate the ecological status of five small estuarine systems (southern Portugal), and also to test if they reflected the level of anthropogenic pressures. Fish assemblages from Mira, Odeceixe and Aljezur (in the Southwest coast), Gilão and Bensafrim (in the South coast) estuaries were sampled seasonally for one year, and anthropogenic sources of pressure were identified and quantified. We found that although the applied indices provided information on ecological condition differentiation among systems, they are unable to explain different classes of ecological status in systems with equivalent pressure levels.
建立河口系统生态质量的重要性已得到广泛认可，并促成了几种基于鱼类群落的多指标指数的发展。然而，当自然干扰作用于系统群落的组织时，这些工具的准确性就成了一个问题。本文使用了四个多指标指数来检验它们区分五个小型河口系统（葡萄牙南部）生态状况的能力，并测试它们是否反映了人为压力的水平。米拉、奥德塞什和阿尔杰祖尔（西南海岸）、吉拉奥和本萨弗里姆（南海岸）河口的鱼类群落在一年内进行了季节性采样，并确定和量化了人为压力源。我们发现，尽管所应用的指数提供了关于系统间生态状况差异的信息，但它们无法解释在压力水平相同的系统中不同类别的生态状况。
