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Chemometric discrimination between streams based on chemical, limnological and biological data taken from freshwater fishes and their interrelationships

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Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress and Recovery

Abstract

The VALIMAR project aims at identifyingbiomarkers in fish that are suitable to detectand predict environmental stress from chemicalpollution or from limnological parameters inthe field. For two small streams in SouthernGermany, concentration values of 31contaminants in water and sediment and 12 limnological parameters as well as 27 biomarkersmeasured in brown trout and stone loach werecollected. All these physicochemical andbiological parameters have been analysed forpatterns that discriminate between the streams,using discriminant analysis (DA), analysis ofvariance (ANOVA) and of covariance (ANCOVA), and principal component analysis (PCA) asmultivariate statistical techniques. Moreover,the biological data were analyzed with respectto species-specific patterns, and the partialleast-squares regression method (PLS) was usedto study the impact of chemical and limnological data on the health status of the targetspecies as characterized by the biomarker data.Abiotic as well as biotic data yielded goodseparations between the streams, with theultrastructure of gill (US-gill) being thestrongest discriminator variable among all 27biomarkers tested. With regard to the two fishspecies, the biomarker data from brown troutshow significantly greater differences betweenthe two streams than the biological responsesin stone loach. Application of PLS yieldssignificant regression models for only fewbiomarkers including US-Gill, which can bepartly traced back to significant noise levelsin the data set as quantified by permutationtests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Ecotoxicology, UFZ Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstr. 15, D-04318, Leipzig, Germany

    Uwe Dietze & Helmut Segner

  2. Zoological Institute, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 230, D-69120, Heidelberg, Germany

    Thomas Braunbeck

  3. Steinbeis-Transfer-Centre Applied and Environmental Chemistry, Alteburgstrasse 150, D-72762, Reutlingen, Germany

    Wolfgang Honnen & Rita Triebskorn

  4. Animal Physiological Ecology, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 28, D-72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Heinz-R. Köhler & Rita Triebskorn

  5. Dept. Aquatic Ecology Research, Bavarian Water Management Agency, Demollstrasse 31, D-82407, Wielenbach, Germany

    Julia Schwaiger

  6. Department of Chemical Ecotoxicology, UFZ Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstr. 15, D-04318, Leipzig, Germany

    Gerrit Schüürmann

Authors
  1. Uwe Dietze
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  2. Thomas Braunbeck
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  3. Wolfgang Honnen
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  4. Heinz-R. Köhler
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  5. Julia Schwaiger
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  6. Helmut Segner
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  7. Rita Triebskorn
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  8. Gerrit Schüürmann
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Correspondence to Gerrit Schüürmann.

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Dietze, U., Braunbeck, T., Honnen, W. et al. Chemometric discrimination between streams based on chemical, limnological and biological data taken from freshwater fishes and their interrelationships. Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Stress and Recovery 8, 319–336 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012979502278

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012979502278

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