Trichoptera as bioindicators of habitat integrity in the Pindaíba river basin, Mato Grosso (Central Brazil)

We evaluated the influence of environmental integrity and the potential as bioindicator of larval stages of species of Trichoptera in 20 streams of first to fourth order in the Pindaíba river basin, Mato Grosso, Central Brazil. We measured stream integrity with the habitat integrity index (HII), establishing three levels of conservation: preserved, altered and impacted environments. We used (i) simple regression to assess the effect of habitat integrity on species abundance of Trichoptera and (ii) the indicator species analysis (IndVal) to assess the potential as bioindicator of each species. We found that 12 morphospecies showed relationship with HII: six species were bioindicators of preserved and two species of altered environments. Morphospecies that showed relationship in the two analyses (i and ii) were considered strong bioindicators, considering that the other species supported higher environmental variation, becoming evident that loss of physical structure reduces the abundance of organisms specialized in preserved environments. The results showed that the distribution and abundance of trichopterans can be an indicator of habitat integrity. Trichopteran species have bioindicator potential, corroborating the hypotheses of this work that abundance of organisms will be smaller in environments with low integrity, and that many species are specific to preserved environments, disappearing from impacted environments, and also characteristic species of altered environments.