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DEVELOPMENT OF INDICATORS OF EXPOSURE AND RESPONSE TO SEDIMENT AND HABITAT ALTERATION IN LAKE MICHIGAN COASTAL RIVERINE WETLANDS
Citation:
Moffett, M F., N E. Detenbeck, T. M. Jicha, C M. Elonen, L E. Anderson, D L. Taylor, V M. Snarski, AND T. P. Simon. DEVELOPMENT OF INDICATORS OF EXPOSURE AND RESPONSE TO SEDIMENT AND HABITAT ALTERATION IN LAKE MICHIGAN COASTAL RIVERINE WETLANDS. Presented at 44th Annual International Association for Great Lakes Research Meeting, Green Bay, WI, June 10-14, 2001.
Description:
Measures are being assessed to quantify the relationship of land-use in upstream watersheds to the habitat and biota in downstream coastal wetlands. Twenty-two sites were randomly drawn from a pool of 125 identified as riverine coastal wetlands along the shore of Lake Michigan. Wetlands ranged from a few acres to >1000 acres and cut across five ecoregions. During the 2000 growing season, stressors measured were land-use, nutrients, tributary hydrology, and sediment load. Habitat features of coastal wetlands including wetland shoreline complexity, seiche amplitude and periodicity, substrate composition, and thermal regimes were measured to relate to fish, macroinvertebrate and plant communities, and water quality. The degree to which probabilistic sampling design of coastal wetlands will be used across Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie as part of the U.S. EPA Regional Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (R-EMAP) to assess fish communities; a subset of sites will be used to further test exposure and response measures across a gradient of degraded habitats. For future work a GIS approach to identification and classification of hydrogeomorphic types of Great Lakes coastal werlands for basinwide monitoring is being used.