2022 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Virtual Conference
March 13 - 15, 2022
6/06/2017 | 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM | BALANCING THE NEED FOR IMPROVING ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS AND CONSISTENCY AMONG THEM: AN EXAMPLE FROM THE PROBLEM IN THE PLAINS | 301A
BALANCING THE NEED FOR IMPROVING ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENTS AND CONSISTENCY AMONG THEM: AN EXAMPLE FROM THE PROBLEM IN THE PLAINS
Maintaining consistency in ecological assessments is challenging because so many new methods are being developed to improve assessments and new assessment goals are emerging. We use problems in the plains ecoregions to evaluate challenges with consistency and improving assessments. We used structured equation modeling and data from the USEPA National Streams and Rivers Assessment (NRSA) to test the hypotheses that human disturbance as well as naturally varying factors in watersheds affected in-stream abiotic conditions, and both of these either directly or indirectly affected biological condition as measured by diatom metrics developed and tested for the NRSA. We found great differences among the nine ecoregions tested, with problems relating human disturbance and diatom metrics in plains ecoregions. Gradient forest statistics showed diatom species composition does respond to human disturbance in plains ecoregions. New diatom metrics increased the sensitivity of biological assessments to human disturbance. Despite need for new metrics and new metric modeling approaches, consistency in assessments can be maintained by expanding our framework for assessment and continuing to gather the same data, so old and new data can be reanalyzed with both the old and new methods.
- C01 Algae
- C17 Bioassessment
- S27 Advancing Consistency in Ecological Assessments
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Presenters/Authors
Jan Stevenson
(), Michigan State University, rjstev@cns.msu.edu;
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Tao Tang
(), Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, tangtao@ihb.ac.cn;
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