Comparison of two commonly used methods for identifying water quality thresholds in freshwater ecosystems using field and synthetic data.

Defining ecological thresholds has become increasingly relevant for water resource management. Despite the fact that there has been a rapid expansion in methods to evaluate ecological threshold responses to environmental stressors, evaluation of the relative benefits of various methods has received less attention. This study compares the performance of Gradient Forest (GF) and Threshold Indicator Taxa Analysis (TITAN) for identifying water quality thresholds in both field and synthetic data. Analysis of 14 years of macroinvertebrates data from the Mediterranean catchments of the Torrens and Onkaparinga Rivers, South-Australia, identified electrical conductivity (EC) and total phosphorus (TP) as the most important water quality variables affecting macroinvertebrates. Water quality thresholds for macroinvertebrates identified by both methods largely corresponded at low EC (GF: 400-900 μS cm

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.