Abstract

PINILLA A, GABRIEL A.; DUARTE COY, JULIANA  and  VEGA MORA, LEONEL. Limnological State Index (LSI) to Evaluate Ecological Conditions of the Canal del Dique Wetlands, Colombia. Acta biol.Colomb. [online]. 2010, vol.15, n.2, pp.169-188. ISSN 0120-548X.

Determining the ecological state or health of an ecosystem offers useful tools for its management and conservation. In Colombia, indexes of aquatic systems that combine in a single parameter the physical, chemical and biological variables have not been published, and the evaluation of water bodies’ ecological state has been fragmentary or incomplete. In this work a Limnological State Index (LSI) for wetlands of the Canal del Dique, ecosystems under constant pressure by the human communities, is presented. For the construction of this multi-metric index, graphs of quality of the selected variables were constructed and values of importance were assigned to them. The theory of the multi-attributes was used to construct the LSI, which considers 12 variables. A Principal Components Analysis was realized with these chosen parameters. A simplified version was designed (partial LSI -PLSI) in which four of the biological variables were excluded. Finally, an interpretation scale of the values obtained with these indices was built. The LSI and the PLSI were applied to wetlands of the Canal del Dique to establish their current ecological condition. Data show that the limnological state of most wetlands is acceptable, which suggests that these lentic ecosystems are within tolerable limits of function, although they are not exempt from deterioration processes.

Keywords : multimetric index; ecological state; limnological state; wetlands; Canal del Dique.

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