摘要：Introductions of alien species, regardless of their actual or potential impacts, can be considered as a biocontamination of the ecosystem. A simple method to assess biocontamination is described and tested on benthic macroinvertebrate communities from European inland waterways. This method includes calculations of abundance contamination and richness contamination at ordinal taxonomic rank, from which integrated estimations of biocontamination are derived. Our method can be applied to data collected during routine water quality monitoring, and allows estimation of biocontamination at specific study sites as well as integrated assessment of ecosystems or assessment units. Results clearly show that the main European inland waterways are highly biologically contaminated. They also indicate that richness contamination precedes abundance contamination, and that severe abundance contamination may be caused even by a single ecologically aggressive alien species. Comparison of biocontamination indices and ecological quality status by conventional methods suggests that these metrics are negatively correlated, and richness contamination has a stronger negative affect than abundance contamination. Biocontamination warrants inclusion within the development of holistic estimates of ecological quality status and should be considered in water management policy.
