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

Abstract

Abstract 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 ...