A comparison of two methods for surveying aquatic macrophyte communities in boreal lakes: Implications for bioassessment

To compare the performance of two common methods for surveying boreal lake aquatic macrophyte communities (the transect survey and the phytolittoral inventory) in lake bioassessment, we studied five small humic lakes with both methods. In addition to this pairwise comparison, we contrasted available independent sets of reference lake data of either methodological origin. Specifically, we compared the observed species richness and a number of ecological quality (community) metrics and their variability both between the methods and within them in relation to sampling effort and operator. With the phytolittoral inventory, more taxa (mean 38.8 ± s.d. 12.1) were observed than with transect surve…