%0 Journal Article
%T Benthic Macroinvertebrates along the Haraz Downstream in Southern Caspian Sea Basin: In Gradient of the Physicochemical Parameters
%A Amir Faraz Ghasemi
%A Morteza Kamali
%J International Journal of Zoology
%D 2014
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2014/145430
%X The Haraz River is one of the most important rivers in the Caspian Sea basin. In order to investigate changes in the taxa abundance composition and feeding groups of the benthic macroinvertebrates, twelve-time sampling was carried out at nine stations along three different sites: (1) before, (2) into, and (3) after Amol City. Results showed impacts of anthropogenic activities caused by the urbanization and development on the occurrence of benthic macroinvertebrates taxa. Families, Hydropsychidae and Heptageniidae at site 1 and Tipulidae at sites 2 and 3, were significantly dominant. The feeding groups of gathering collectors and predators increased from site 1 to site 3, while the filtering collectors and scrapers decreased. Consequently, our data supported the use of the bioindicator concept for Haraz River. Some sensitive (Hydropsychidae, Heptageniidae, Baetidae, and Leuctridae) and tolerant families (Tipulidae and Naididae/Tubificidae) are introduced as potential bioindicators of clean and disturbed riverĄ¯s area, respectively. 1. Introduction The benthic macroinvertebrates have long been used as indicators for biological monitoring programs. They play a key role in freshwater ecosystems in linking decomposers and producers food chains with top predators. They inhabited throughout the length of the river with large number of species, limited mobility, and relatively long lifespan, and so forth [1¨C6]. These characters offer a spectrum of responses to perturbations and, thus, their relative abundances have been used to make inferences about pollution loads such as organic pollution and nutrient enrichment [1, 3, 7¨C9]. The physicochemical analyses of the water quality are capable of detecting disturbance directly and only reflect the water quality at the moment of sampling. In contrast, the biological communities provide more faithful reflection of environmental conditions, since they are continually exposed to pollutants. Therefore, the study of biological communities as a bioindicator can reveal the impacts of intermittent or unrecorded pollution incidents [1¨C3, 9]. Nonetheless, the use of macrobenthic invertebrates for bioindication purposes seems not to be popular or widespread in the Asian ecoregion. However, this technique provides a cheaper and worth method in river classification, as they are widely used in the Northern American and European ecoregions [8, 9]. In rivers of the southern Caspian Sea basin and especially Haraz River, information on the spatiotemporal variations in abundance composition of benthic communities is still extremely poor.
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/2014/145430/