Temporal Changes In Urban Stream Macroinvertebrate Assemblages: A Bayesian Hierarchical Approach To Analysing Sparse Monitoring Data

Temporal analysis of ecological monitoring data is of critical importance in order to demonstrate whether management actions are having the desired effects, and whether there are changes in environmental condition. Over recent years in Australia, temporal trend analyses of water quality data by techniques such as Generalised Additive Modelling have become commonplace. In contrast, analyses of temporal trends in biological monitoring data are rare. We believe this is at least partly explained by the fact that biological data time series generally have far fewer points than abiotic time series data, invalidating the use of common trend analysis techniques.