The effect of automated taxa identification errors on biological indices

In benthic macroinvertebrate biomonitoring systems, the target is to determine the status of ecosystems based on several biological indices. To increase cost-efficiency, computer-based taxa identification for image data has recently been developed. Taxa identification errors can, however, have strong effects on the indices and thus on the determination of the ecological status. In order to shift the biomonitoring process towards automated expert systems, we need a clear understanding on the bias caused by automation. In this paper, we examine eleven classification methods in the case of macroinvertebrate image data and show how their classification errors propagate into different biological…