Abstract:

This dataset includes the abundances of adult insect species belonging to select families that were collected monthly from 18 sites across the salinity gradient within Barataria and Caillou bays in coastal Louisiana from 2018-01-29 to 2019-06-23. The abundances of insect species are reported for each collection date, bay, salinity zone, and site. The dataset will be submitted in excel format.

Suggested Citation:

Aker, Ben G., Claudia Husseneder, Nathan P. Lord, Lane D. Foil. 2022. Insect species community data used for the selection of bioindicators of different salinity zones within Louisiana's coastal marshes from 2018-01-29 to 2019-06-23. Distributed by: GRIIDC, Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. doi:10.7266/TEJ9QZ1E

Purpose:

This dataset was collected to identify insect species to be used as bioindicators of salinity zones within Louisiana's coastal marshes.

Data Parameters and Units:

Date (mm/dd/yyyy), Bay, Salinity Zone, Site, Species Abundances

Methods:

An exploratory Indicator Value Analysis (IndVal) was performed to determine which insect families are statistically significant bioindicators for each plant community or group of plant communities using the R package indicspecies (Dufrêne and Legendre 1997; De Cáceres and Jansen 2016). The IndVal statistic is a measure of fidelity (the percentage of the target taxa that is found within a specific site group) multiplied by a value of specificity (the percentage of sites within the specific site group from which the target taxa was collected) multiplied by 100 for a maximum value of 1; this output is followed by permutation tests for significance and corrections for multiple testing. Families that were found to be significant indicators for a salinity or groups of salinity zone and had an IndVal statistic above 0.25 were identified to the lowest taxonomic level possible using the relevant keys and species descriptions. A second IndVal procedure was performed to find which taxa within families are the most useful as indicators and which are most often collected outside of the relevant salinity zones.

Provenance and Historical References:

Dufrêne, Marc and Pierre Legendre. 1997. Species assemblages and indicator species: the need for a flexible asymmetrical approach. Ecological Monographs, 67(3): 345-366. DOI: 10.1890/0012-9615(1997)067[0345:SAAIST]2.0.CO;2 De Cáceres, M, F Jansen, MM De Caceres. 2016. Indicspecies: relationship between species and groups of sites, R package, Version 1 (4), 2014, 2016.

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