Are biological classifications of headwater streams concordant across multiple taxonomic groups?

Summary 1. Studies assessing human impacts on freshwater ecosystems are typically based on a single taxonomic group, often macroinvertebrates or fish. Unfortunately, the degree to which such macroinvertebrate or fish-based surveys can be generalised across other taxonomic groups remains largely unknown. A prerequisite for useful generalisations is that different taxonomic groups exhibit concordant patterns of community structure across sites. 2. We examined the concordance among fish, benthic macroinvertebrates and bryophytes in 32 streams in a boreal catchment in Finland. Our goal was to test how consistently different taxonomic groups classify stream sites; for example, can site groupings…