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The Problem
The Popo Agie Conservation District (PACD), headquartered in Lander, Wyoming, is developing a management plan for the Popo Agie Watershed, coordinating a diverse team of scientists and community leaders from various organizations, and utilizing the most current scientific methods available. There are 36 past and current ecological projects that have data pertinent to a study of the Popo Agie Watershed (Popo Agie Conservation District 1999), including soil, water quality, and riparian surveys, irrigation reports, grazing management plans, natural resources inventories, and various spatial data sets, including remote sensing and GIS databases. A key component in developing an effective management plan is the need for a scientifically valid and rigorous monitoring program. Ideally, this monitoring would first provide a comprehensive baseline, followed by regular annual or semi-annual data to determine trends relevant to biological viability, long-term productivity, and ecosystem sustainability of the watershed. Paramount in this monitoring is the need to identify leading indicators of stress and their potential to detect disruption of normal ecosystem processes.
Objectives The 5-year research goal of the Fisheries and Aquatic Resources Program is to understand relationships between and among aquatic species habitats.The effort by WFRC in this subtask is to aid in fieldwork, specifically the collection of organisms and determinations of water quality, to develop and apply measures of developmental instability to a variety of organisms, and to compare those measures with standard EPA (and State of Wyoming) bioassessment indicators and such community indicators of health as the Index of Biotic Integrity. We hope to provide measures and analytic techniques that will prove more sensitive, less expensive and less laboratory and/or training-intensive than those currently in standard use.Methodology Field: collect water samples (analyzed by others in the Popo Agie program)
and fish and aquatic insects and diatoms. Analysis: Measures and appropriate software development to examine developmental
instability in the fish and invertebrates and correlate it with water
quality measures.
Highlights and Key Findings 10/1/2001 - A second year of fieldwork was conducted. Identification of insects and diatoms is completed for year 1. Developmental instability analysis on both insects and fish is in progress. 04/21/2000 - One full field season completed. Collection of fish and insect samples for first year completed. Partial analysis of developmental instability measure for insects completed. Insect sample identification nearly complete. Where Are We Headed In 2003 No information provided. Project Contact John Emlen Email: john_emlen@usgs.gov Publications |
