title: Insights into assessing environmental quality status using potential surrogates of biofilm-dwelling ciliate fauna in coastal waters.
abstract: To determine potential surrogates of biofilm-dwelling ciliate fauna for assessing water quality, a dataset of coastal waters of the Yellow Sea was studied. Samples were collected monthly at a depth of 1 m from four sampling stations during a 1-year cycle (August 2011-July 2012), northern China. The ciliate communities at low taxonomic resolutions up to family level were significantly correlated with the full ciliate fauna at species-level resolution and represented a significant spatial variation in relation to the environmental changes. The presence/absence resolutions up to genus level maintained sufficient information of the ciliate species-abundance matrix. The vagile and sessile ciliate assemblages were significantly correlated with the full ciliate communities but only the latter maintained sufficient information with a significant spatial variation in response to the environmental stress. Correlation analyses showed that the taxon richness indices of potential surrogates at genus- and family-level resolutions can explain >95 % of the variance in that of the full species pool. Thus, it is suggested that the taxonomic resolutions up to family level may be a robust time-efficient surrogate of whole periphytic ciliate communities for assessing water quality status and would allow improving sampling strategies of large spatial scale monitoring programs, using biofilm-dwelling ciliates, in coastal waters.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Evolution and Marine Biodiversity, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266003, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Yuanyuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yuping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Henglong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D044822:Biodiversity; D018441:Biofilms; D002681:China; D016798:Ciliophora / Q000502:physiology*; D066264:Datasets as Topic; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D009792:Oceans and Seas; D013045:Species Specificity; D060753:Water Quality / Q000592:standards*