Assessment of river ecological status in the French West Indies based on diatom flora

• DOI: 10.1007/s10661-024-12980-w
• Publication Date: 2024-08-29T06:02:37Z
• Authors: Léonard Heinry; Julie Guéguen; Sébastien Boutry; François Delmas; Estelle Lefrançois; Anne Eulin-Garrigue; Olivier Monnier; Juliette Tison-Ro...
• Keywords: Flora

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires member states to routinely assess the river ecological status using community-based indices. However, there is still a lack of published WFD-compliant methods for French West Indies, especially diatom-based Martinique and Guadeloupe exhibit diverse landscapes shaped by their complex geological history tropical climatic conditions. These strong particularities make existing indices developed European mainland unusable. Based on diatom sampling from 2013 (607 samples) through multivariate analyses, we Indice Diatomique des Antilles (IDA). We first identified key abiotic factors influencing communities both islands, then characterized taxon sensitivity considering presence probability along pressure gradient.. index was based relative abundance these taxa in each sample. last step consisted new data 2014–2022 surveys (457 as validation dataset verify IDA accuracy. Our results suggest that methodology well designed rivers Indies.