Eco-environment quality assessment of macrobenthic community in the East Ningde sea waters

Macrobenthos was investigated at 30 stations in the east Ningde sea waters in both March and November, 2016.A total of 99 species (75 species in March; 51 species in November) were found, including 44 species of Polychaetes, 22 species of Crustacea, 16 species of Mollusca, and 17species of other taxa.In this paper, the AZTI marine biotic index (AMBI) and the multivariate-AMBI (M-AMBI), were first applied to assess the eco-environmental quality of the east Ningde sea waters, and the assessment results were compared with those by the Shannon-Weaver Indexes (H'), aimed to test the applicability of these indices to the east Ningde sea waters.The result showed that most stations were slightly disturbed, especially in autumn.Compared with the results from AMBI, M-AMBI and H', the environment pollution degrees derived from AMBI was slightly lower than those derived from M-AMBI and H'.The assessment results based on M-AMBI could be more reasonable and coincident with H'.Thus it was suggested that for the east Ningde sea waters which is dominated by sensitive benthos species, M-AMBI and H' could be more applicative and objective than AMBI in assessing its eco-environmental quality.