Modeling Dinophysis in Western Andalucía using an autoregressive hidden Markov model

Dinophysis spp. can produce diarrhetic shellfish toxins (DST) including okadaic acid and dinophysistoxins, and some strains can also produce non-diarrheic pectenotoxins. Although DSTs are of human health concern and have motivated environmental monitoring programs in many locations, these monitoring programs often have temporal data gaps (e.g., days without measurements). This paper presents a model for the historical time-series, on a daily basis, of DST-producing toxigenic Dinophysis in 8 monitored locations in western Andalucía over 2015–2020, incorporating measurements of algae counts and DST levels. We fitted a bivariate hidden Markov Model (HMM) incorporating an autoregressive correlation among the observed DST measurements to account for environmental persistence of DST. We then reconstruct the maximum-likelihood profile of algae presence in the water column at daily intervals using the Viterbi algorithm. Using historical monitoring data from Andalucía, the model estimated that potentially toxigenic Dinophysis algae is present at greater than or equal to 250 cells/L between < 1% and >10% of the year depending on the site and year. The historical time-series reconstruction enabled by this method may facilitate future investigations into temporal dynamics of toxigenic Dinophysis blooms.