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Macroinvertebrate Bioassessment of Great Lakes Area of Concern (AOC) Sites: Choosing the Best Metrics and Analyses to Assess the Success of Remediation and Restoration Efforts.
Citation:
Yeardley, R., M. Mills, Jim Lazorchak, AND M. Griffith. Macroinvertebrate Bioassessment of Great Lakes Area of Concern (AOC) Sites: Choosing the Best Metrics and Analyses to Assess the Success of Remediation and Restoration Efforts. SETAC Meeting 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, November 13 - 17, 2022.
Impact/Purpose:
ORD plays a vital role in the process of remediation and restoration of Great Lakes Areas of Concern (AOCs) by refining, developing, and giving guidance on methods, metrics, and models to assess the effectiveness of restoration outcomes. This presentation will communicate to scientific community and our state and federal partners ORD's efforts to develop the best bioassessment tools to evaluate the effectiveness of remedies which have the potential to improve the human health, environment, and economies of AOC communities. As AOCs tend to be highly populated, these remedies can potentially have positive impacts on the lives of large numbers of people.
Description:
The U.S. EPA's Office of Research and Development (ORD), in working with its multiple state and federal parters, is tasked with helping to determine if conditions have improved post-remediation at Great Lakes Area of Concern (AOC) sites. For one core line of evidence, macroinvertebrate communities, some state environmental agency partners have standard indices which have been historically used for their ongoing bioassessments and delisting of Beneficial Use Impairments (BUIs) at AOC sites. For example, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has a multi-metric BAP index and Ohio EPA uses a 10-metric index called the Lacustrine Index of Community Integrity (LICI) for bioassessment of water quality with macroinvertebrate communities. However, the overarching goal is report whether there is a change in communities that reflects a change in water quality, pre- and post-remedy. As a research organization with a core skill of methods development, one of the contributions that ORD can make towards this goal is to explore what types of metrics and analyses offer the best chance to detect differences in communities. The goal to detect community differences is complicated by the lack of suitable reference sites at most AOCs, which are in highly populated and developed areas. Our presentation will explore what macroinvertebrate community metrics Great Lakes states are finding useful, as well as analysis of the usefulness of some common and not-so-common metrics and analyses with data from multiple AOC sites. We will also touch on how to deal with the reference site issue. One category of analyses which appears to have a high power to detect differences in macroinvertebrate communities are multivariate ordinations. For example, ANOVAs comparing total taxa richness at 8 Niagara River tributary sites showed no significant differences among sites for communities collected wih either the NYSDEC (p=0.667) or US. EPA HD sampler type (P=0.093). However, Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling (NMS) followed by MRPP found much more significant differences in community type between sites (T=-14.53, p=0.000000001) than between sampler type (T= -5.25, p=0.000272).
