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Retrospective Montioring of Ecosystem Changes Using Published Data, Lessons Learned from Egypt's Nile River Delta
Citation:
OCZKOWSKI, A. Retrospective Montioring of Ecosystem Changes Using Published Data, Lessons Learned from Egypt's Nile River Delta. Presented at 3rd International Symposium on Ecology and Biodiversity in Large Rivers of Northeast Asia and North America, Memphis, TN, September 24, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
This poster will synthesize pre-existing in-country data for four large lagoons on Egypt’s Nile Delta and demonstrate how these data can provide insight into how the ecosystems have changed over time. The Nile Delta Lagoons have been dramatically altered by human activities and dozens of individual studies, taken together, create a rough timeline documenting many of these changes. In many ecosystems, particularly in developing countries, monitoring programs do not begin until after substantial change has occurred. The Delta lagoons dataset is an important example of how, even in the absence of organized monitoring programs, we can still document ecosystem changes.
Description:
Monitoring programs for riverine and wetland ecosystems often do not begin until some substantial shift in ecosystem structure or loss of ecosystem service has taken place. Sometimes a lack of resources or interest may impede monitoring efforts. In the case of the large brackish lagoon wetlands on Egypt’s Nile Delta, apparent shifts in ecosystem productivity and structure have gone unmonitored for decades. However, dozens of individual efforts by local scientists studying specific aspects of these different ecosystems have been taken together as a substitute for a cohesive, organized monitoring program. While imperfect, this dataset provides important insight into changes in the delta’s wetland biology, in particular with regard to commercially important fish species, as well as abiotic factors like nutrient concentrations and dissolved oxygen. In the absence of a deliberate monitoring program, such assembled retrospective analyses can establish an important baseline to which future studies of ecosystem structure and services can be referenced.