Subsequent application of self-organizing map and hidden Markov models infer community states of stream benthic macroinvertebrates

Because an ecological community consists of diverse species that vary nonlinearly with environmental variability, its dynamics are complex and difficult to analyze. To investigate temporal variations of benthic macroinvertebrate community, we used the community data that were collected at the sampling site in Baenae Stream near Busan, Korea, which is a clean stream with minimum pollution, from July 2006 to July 2013. First, we used a self-organizing map (SOM) to heuristically derive the states that characterizes the biotic condition of the benthic macroinvertebrate communities in forms of time series data. Next, we applied the hidden Markov model (HMM) to fine-tune the states objectively and to obtain the transition probabilities between the states and the emission probabilities that show the connection of the states with observable events such as the number of species, the diversity measured by Shannon entropy, and the biological water quality index (BMWP). While the number of species apparently addressed the state of the community, the diversity reflected the state changes after the HMM training along with seasonal variations in cyclic manners. The BMWP showed clear characterization of events that correspond to the different states based on the emission probabilities. The environmental factors such as temperature and precipitation also indicated the seasonal and cyclic changes according to the HMM. Though the usage of the HMM alone can guarantee the convergence of the training or the precision of the derived states based on field data in this study, the derivation of the states by the SOM that followed the fine-tuning by the HMM well elucidated the states of the community and could serve as an alternative reference system to reveal the ecological structures in stream communities.