2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
6/06/2017 | 11:45 AM - 12:00 PM | THE ROLE OF TEMPORAL VARIABILITY IN ESTIMATING REFERENCE CONDITIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ACCURACY OF ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS | 301A
THE ROLE OF TEMPORAL VARIABILITY IN ESTIMATING REFERENCE CONDITIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ACCURACY OF ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS
Biological assessments seek to determine whether observed conditions are outside the range of naturally occurring conditions (RNOC) at a site. Most attempts to estimate the RNOC account for natural spatial variation in assemblages among reference sites and implicitly assume that residual variation is accounted for using a space-for-time substitution. For example, multitaxon distribution models are used in O/E indices to predict the expected assemblage composition at individual test sites, to which observed assemblages are compared. The precision of O/E indices, variance in reference site values, is used to set thresholds for determining departure from the RNOC. Recent research has shown that reference site assemblages exhibit different temporal dynamics and that O/E index precision can vary with physiographic setting. For example, assemblages in arid regions appear to be more temporally dynamic than those in more mesic regions, and arid region O/E indices have relatively low precision. Such results suggest site- or region-specific condition thresholds are needed to manage rates of under versus over protection. We observed that thresholds derived from large-scale versus smaller, region-specific data sets can substantially affect inferences regarding the extent of stream kilometers assigned to different condition classes.
- C17 Bioassessment
- C11 Community Ecology
- S27 Advancing Consistency in Ecological Assessments
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Presenters/Authors
Scott Miller
(), BLM/USU National Aquatic Monitoring Center, Department of Watershed Sciences, Utah State University, scott.miller@usu.edu;
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Charles Hawkins
(), Utah State University, chuck.hawkins@usu.edu;
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Jennifer Courtwright
(), BLM/Utah State University National Aquatic Monitoring Center, jennifer.courtwright@usu.edu;
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