A new tool for aquatic ecosystem health assessment in the Canadian Prairies
The rivers and streams weaving through western prairies are crucial for human occupation but are surrounded by high amounts of land use that can affect the water quality, hydrology, habitat and health of these aquatic environments.
Figuring out whether particular waterbodies are healthy or not requires a foundation of understanding what aquatic communities should inhabit these rivers and streams in the absence of human activities, and then detailed research into how these communities respond to different sources and magnitudes of stress.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
However, the prairies have extensive development that has made finding waterbodies with no human influence challenging. Adding to this complication, unique fauna and the natural variation in environmental extremes of stream permanence and water quality mean that existing tools for health assessment are inappropriate to apply.
Starting from scratch we examined hundreds of river reaches across prairie ecoregions and stream orders to build an ecosystem health monitoring tool that characterizes what communities of benthic organisms should inhabit these rivers and streams when they have as little human stress as possible, and what measures of the community best respond to specific human stressors.
Ultimately, we built a method that will evaluate the ecosystem health of sites and characterize measures that indicate where stress is coming from.
Further, our work in developing benthic measures forensic of specific human stressors led to broader analyses that characterize how invertebrate abundance and community composition are affected along gradients of land use.
Specifically, that for some regions of the prairies, increasing cultivation in the contributing areas of watersheds leads to lower invertebrate abundance and altered community composition. In a broad landscape context, conserving and restoring uncultivated land in the contributing areas of watersheds will ensure higher invertebrate abundance and healthy ecosystems here.
With this ecosystem health tool in place, water managers and stakeholders can now evaluate the biological condition of their rivers and streams in the Northern Great Plains and identify management directions that can improve the ecological quality of the waterbodies throughout this region.
Read the paper — Saskatchewan Condition Assessment of Lotic Ecosystems (SCALE): A multivariate tool for assessing the integrity of Northern Great Plains wadeable rivers and streams by Iain D. Phillips, Glen McMaster, Douglas P. Chivers, and Michelle F. Bowman.
