Harnessing aquatic plant growth forms to apply European nutrient-enrichment bioindicators to Canadian waters.

We leveraged the ecological relationship between increased surface water nutrient enrichment and the dominance of particular aquatic plant growth forms to generalize aquatic plant trophic indices. We demonstrated an approach for adapting species-based indices to plant traits to facilitate a broader geographic application and simpler data collection, which could be used to develop an easily applied trait-based method of assessing water nutrient status.