However, the majority of rapid assessment methods are based on data from a single taxonomic group; a multi-taxa index should provide a more integrated evaluation of the response of a disturbed system.
Habitat diversity indices, taxa richness, biodiversity, and bio-community indices are much higher in Shengou Creek relative to Jiangjia and Xiaobaini Ravines, attesting to the effectiveness of rehabilitation measures.
Let A be the matrix with rows indexed by pairs of taxa and columns indexed by splits.
The only reason the Ringbone Formation is assigned to the Kirtlandian age is because the rocks are the same age as the Fort Crittenden Formation, which contains one of the index taxa of the Kirtlandian.
In the character-by-taxon matrix, the rows index taxa, or operational taxonomic units (OTUs), and the columns index characters.
However, Grunert et al. (2010) point out that the index taxa Sphenolithus belemnos and Sphenolithus heteromorphus are rare and that the assemblages show clear affinities with the Mediterranean zone MNN3b.
For the set of analyzed taxa, the complexity index ranged from 0 to 9. We tested for a correlation between presence of mouth dimorphism and stomatal complexity using the dataset that included all 87 species of Rhabditina and the threshold model (Felsenstein, 2012) as implemented in the R package phytools 0.3-72 0.3-72l, 2012).
The global marginality, specialisation, and tolerance indices did not differ among the three taxa, but the indices indicated that their ecological requirements were rather marginal and specialized with respect to the global distribution of the EGV values in our reference set, i.e. that defined by the environmental conditions encountered across the whole of Burkina Faso (Additional file 3).
Significant differences in arthropod community were found between agroecological zones for specific taxa, seasonal diversity indexes and functional subgroups.
The same holds true for the ML and BI analyses, from which we excluded the putatively unstable taxa with LS indices LS ≤ 0.50 and LS ≤ 0.60, respectively (supplementary figs. S3 S6, Supplementary Material online).
