An approach to identifying potential surrogates of periphytic ciliate communities for monitoring water quality of coastal waters

For identifying the potential surrogate of periphytic ciliate communities for monitoring marine water quality, the different taxonomic resolutions/taxa as surrogates and different data transformations were studied based on two datasets of ciliate communities in Korean coastal waters. Multivariate analyses showed that: (1) a dominant Zoothamnium duplicatum significantly masked the temporal patterns of periphytic ciliate community; (2) the order level resolution maintained sufficient information to evaluate the efficient patterns of ciliate communities in response to environmental impacts; (3) the vagile-ciliate assemblage at species-level resolution was as costly as whole periphytic ciliate communities without Z. duplicatum at the order level; and (4) the severity of data transformations played a crucial role for effectiveness of surrogates, e.g., heavy transformation for species level and mild for higher. These results suggest that the use of lower taxonomic resolutions is time-efficient and would allow improving sampling strategies of large spatial/temporal scale monitoring researches in the marine ecosystem.