Macroinvertebrate biomonitoring in Latin America: Progress and challenges

CORTELEZZI, A.; PAZ, L.E.

Freshwater Science

University of Chicago Press

Lugar: Chicago; Año: 2023 vol. 23 p. 133 - 213

2161-9549

Macroinvertebrates are used as bioindicators worldwide, but the high diversity of species and endemism in Latin America (LA) requires greater knowledge of this group to increase the efficiency of biomonitoring. We examined some of the primary taxonomic and ecological studies on macroinvertebrates in the region, quantified the number of papers that used foreign and local indexes, examined alternative approaches to bioassessment that may be more relevant for the region, and explored the freshwater ecosystem management in LA. We highlight the need toincrease the taxonomic knowledge and number of specialists in local fauna, establish and maintain taxonomic collections in public institutions, and make available online databases on the biodiversity in each country. However, we also demonstrate that taxonomy specialists of differentnationalities do collaborate on the generation of fundamental information about biodiversity in LA. We found that 57% of the 215 reviewed scientific articles of LA used foreign locally-adapted indexes for the biomonitoring aquatic ecosystems. Only 21% of these articles presented local indexes developed in LA. New technologies, such as eDNA, offer significant potential for bioassessment, but only in regions where sufficient taxonomic knowledge exists and where species-level stressor-response relationships are well described. The implementation of biological traits and multimetric indexes could be an alternative to the taxonomical approach, and occupancy models could be developed to analyze the relationship between taxa and stress factors. These tools could be adopted by researchers to generate more accurate biotic indexes based on local taxa. Finally, in LA, bioindicators are more often used to support scientific research rather than as an environmental monitoring tool. In this sense, environmental laws and regulations that support the biomonitoring of LA freshwaters and unified criteria for evaluating and monitoring aquatic ecosystems are essential to face regional and global challenges.