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Site length for biological assessment of boatable rivers
Citation:
FLOTEMERSCH, J. E., J. B. Stribling, R. M. Hughes, L. REYNOLDS, M. J. Paul, AND C. Wolter. Site length for biological assessment of boatable rivers. River Research and Applications. John Wiley & Sons Incorporated, New York, NY, 27(4):520-535, (2011).
Impact/Purpose:
Our objective is to provide an overview of major biological assessment design alternatives for boatable rivers, with special attention given to determining sufficiency of reach length from which samples are drawn. We suggest that sufficiency of reach length should be based strictly on the quality of data necessary for meeting programmatic data quality objectives. Our intent is that our recommendations would be useful to the maximum number of institutions, including those with limited funds and a purely local focus as well as those responsible for more expansive temporal and geographic scales.
Description:
There is increasing international interest by water resource management agencies worldwide in developing the capacity for quantitative bioassessments of boatable rivers. This interest stems from legal mandates requiring assessments, plus growing reocgnition of the threats to such systems from multiple and co-varying stressors (chemical pollutants, physical habitat alterations, altered flow regimes, channel modifications, and alien species). The elevated cost and inefficiencies of jurisdictionally segregated assessments is widely recognized, thus, coincident with this is a desire to obtain comparable data that can be easily shared among the political jurisdictions. However, differences in sampling methods, indicators, site-scale sampling designs, and the quantity of the resource that is actually sampled differs among programs, thus limiting such data exchanges.