A comparison of genetically and morphometrically identified macroinvertebrate community index scores with implications for aquatic life use attainment

Measures of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities are often used to characterize water quality and indicate whether waterbodies are meeting management expectations. The accuracy of these measures depends on the skill and experience of the person identifying the macroinvertebrates, and obtaining these measures can be relatively expensive due to the time necessary for identification. Utilizing genetic identification of macroinvertebrate taxa has the potential to reduce the time of sample processing, identify a greater number of taxa, and increase the resolution of identification. We compared Colorado multi-metric index (MMI) scores from seven locations in the Big Thompson River, CO, based on genetic and morphometric identification and estimated the ability of MMI scores based on genetic identification to characterize aquatic life use attainment management thresholds. We found a significant linear relationship ( p = 0.002, R 2 = 0.87) between MMI scores generated by genetic and morphological identification. MMIs support the following aquatic life use designations as defined by the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission: Impaired 48, and Ambiguous 40–48. These values correspond to MMIs based on genetic identification as Impaired 64, and Ambiguous = 21–63 based on the prediction interval of the regression equation. Our results suggest that using genetically identified macroinvertebrates to estimate MMI scores can provide some degree of certainty regarding aquatic life use designations, and while it may be inappropriate at the current time to entirely replace morphologically based biotic integrity measures with those based on molecular identification, there are opportunities in their use.