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Rationale and Scope of Checklists
David K. Camp, William G. Lyons, and Thomas H. Perkins
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection
is preparing to use biological criteria to assess human
impacts on the ambient water quality of Florida’s estuaries
and nearshore coastal zone.The use of biocriteria
in environmental regulation and management
is based on the principle that species composition and
biotic abundance can serve as indicators of the environmental
quality of a community and that these biological
factors can be assessed to detect deviations in
community condition and to evaluate trends in environmental
health (Karr and Chu, 1997). To be able to
perform such assessments, however, ecologists must
have access to resources that will allow them to make
accurate and consistent identifications of the biological
components of the community. Accuracy and consistency
of identification are integral parts of biological
quality assurance in regulatory ecology, an enterprise
whose results must be both scientifically valid and
defensible.The more accurate and consistent the identifications
of the biological components of the marine
community are, the more likely it is that trends can be
detected. If early warning signs of environmental impairment
in Florida’s marine communities are to be recognized,
identifications must be accurate at the species
level.
Identifying the fauna of Florida’s estuarine and
coastal marine communities is a challenging task.
Florida is located in the transition area between two marine
zoogeographic zones, the tropical zone to the
south and the temperate zone to the north, and multitudes
of species related to each of these zones contribute
to the state’s fauna, which also contains a significant
endemic component. As a consequence, more
species of marine organisms may be found in Florida
waters than in those of any other of the continental
United States.
Most of Florida’s benthic marine macroinverte-
brate species belong to four principal groups: mollusks,
polychaetous annelids, malacostracan crustaceans,
and echinoderms (Table 1). Species of these
groups are prominent in epibenthic and infaunal samples
taken in shallow waters, and they generally contribute
the greatest numbers of species and individuals
found in these types of samples. Depending on
the habitat and the type of gear used, it is not unusual
for single samples of Florida marine benthos to contain
from 30 to more than 100 species belonging to
these four groups. Because of this great diversity, identifying
organisms to the species level can be difficult
and time-consuming.
Common impediments to the identification process
include scattered or incomplete information on a fauna,
out-of-date literature, and occurrences of “new” (undescribed)
or extralimital species. Even with the recent
decline of taxonomy as a research discipline, newly described
marine invertebrate species are being added
to the list of Florida’s fauna every year, and specimens
of other still-undescribed species are present in many
museum collections, including the Florida Marine Research
Institute’s Marine Specimen Collection at St. Petersburg.
Moreover, the classification of the major marine
invertebrate groups is dynamic, changing as the
understanding of phylogenetic relationships increases,
so even quite familiar names may change from time to
time. All of these factors pose problems of accuracy and
consistency for those charged with conducting longterm,
community-level comparisons of fauna within
and between programs and with maintaining Florida’s
marine biodiversity.
The production, distribution, and periodic up-dating
of authoritative identification guides would do
much to improve the accuracy and consistency of identifications
(Carney, 1996). By making these guides available
to those engaged in faunal assessments in many
Table 1. Numbers of families, genera, and species-level taxa of shallow-water (