Monitoring and Long-term Research
Project experience of our members includes long-term ecological monitoring and research projects, several of which are described below. Most of these projects comprised planning, design, implementation, data analysis, and interpretation. The projects embrace a variety of sampling approaches, both singly and in combination, including: a communications engineering approach, classical statistical (i.e. probabilistic) approaches, and fixed station approaches.
Design and Implementation of the Maryland Biological Stream Survey
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Power Plant Research Program contracted with Versar to design and manage the implementation of a state-wide survey of biological resources in non-tidal streams. Dr. Jacobson managed the program from the design phase through the second year of data collection. The probability-based survey includes quantitative assessment of fish community and benthic macroinvertebrate community structure, instream physical habitat, and acid deposition-related water chemistry. This multi-year project included evaluation of existing data and monitoring programs, selection of biological indicators, statistical design, preparation of a detailed sampling manual describing sampling protocols, data base design, data entry, and analysis. Sampling has been conducted each year from 1993 to the present, and Maryland DNR plans to continue the program into the foreseeable future.
Development of Chesapeake Bay Program Basin-wide Monitoring Strategy
As the multi-jurisdictional organization charged with restoring the natural resources of the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay Program has a continuing need for improved information on physical, chemical, and biological conditions throughout the Bay and its watershed. Working two years under contract through the Chesapeake Research Consortium, Dr. King coordinated development of a monitoring strategy for the Chesapeake Bay Program. This involved developing frameworks designed to organize and promote the integrated collection and interpretation of environmental assessment data. Dr. King worked closely with scientists, federal and state agency staff, and Chesapeake Bay Program representatives from eight subcommittees and over twenty workgroups to define management questions, develop strategic approaches for answering questions, and set priorities for filling existing information gaps. Monitoring topics addressed included tidal and nontidal water quality, toxics, air deposition, land use, and aquatic living resources
Modeling, Monitoring, and Restoration of Patterson Park Lake
Langhei Ecology provided limnological expertise supporting restoration of Patterson Park Lake in Baltimore, Maryland. The 3-acre, artificial lake suffers from the accumulated effects of decades of polluted runoff from an urban park watershed. Langhei Ecology designed the monitoring program to quantify pollutant loading and export rates for the lake, conducted pollutant fate and effects modeling, advised the prime contractor on engineering design criteria to support a diverse, sustainable aquatic ecosystem, and design a long-term monitoring and management plan for the lake. This project was supported by a USEPA grant to the City of Baltimore under Section 319 of the Clean Water Act.
This project is also described under the following project category:
Lake, Stream, and Watershed Management and Restoration
Sampling Program Design for a Watershed Restoration Project in Western Maryland
A comprehensive sampling program was designed to characterize baseline ecological conditions and track ecological changes in response to mitigation of acidic stream conditions in Murley Run watershed in western Maryland. The probabilistic sampling design supports unbiased estimates of ecological conditions in the entire stream network, and in subunits of the network. The resulting data will be used to assess the need for and quantify the ecological benefits of acid mitigation. The data will also be used to evaluate the advisability and effectiveness of other restoration activities, such as reintroduction of extirpated fishes.
This project is also described under the following project category:
Lake, Stream, and Watershed Management and Restoration
Estimation of Fish Abundance for the Lake Mendota Biomanipulation Project
Hydroacoustic surveys were designed, implemented, and analyzed to provide absolute estimates of planktivore abundance for an experimental biomanipulation study in Lake Mendota, Wisconsin. This long-term experiment examined the ability of lake managers to reduce algal biomass through top-down manipulation of the food web (i.e. stocking of piscivores). Long term monitoring of the system was needed to strengthen inferences drawn from the experiment in the face of temporal variation in important components of the ecosystem and the time lag between stocking of juvenile piscivores and the onset of significant piscivory by those fish. Repeated acoustic surveys, conducted to track changes in the abundance of pelagic planktivores, documented a 95% decline in planktivore abundance unrelated to the stocking of piscivores. The absolute abundance estimates before and after the decline permitted quantitative prediction of changes at lower trophic levels that were subsequently verified with field data. This work was funded by a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology.
This project is also described under the following project categories:
Hydroacoustics
Lake, Stream, and Watershed Management and Restoration
Hydroacoustic Fish Sampling Design for the LTER-North Temperate Lakes Program
The NSF-sponsored Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) North Temperate Lakes (NTL) program conducts multi-faceted, long-term research on ecological processes in a suite of lakes in northern Wisconsin. Research on one of the lakes, Trout Lake, demonstrated that the statistical power of hydroacoustic surveys of fish abundance used by the LTER-NTL program could be substantially improved by reallocating sampling effort from replication (for variance estimation) to increased spatial coverage. The hydroacoustic sampling protocol for each lake in the LTER-NTL program was redesigned based on dispersion characteristics of the fish and statistical precision of the hydroacoustic sampling methodology. This work was sponsored by an NSF grant and an Office of Naval Research contract, both to the University of Wisconsin Center for Limnology.
This project is also described under the following project category:
Hydroacoustics
Limnological Monitoring and Research on Oneida Lake
The Cornell University Department of Natural Resources maintains a long-term ecological monitoring and research program on Oneida Lake, New York. As part of that program fish, zooplankton, phytoplankton, and water chemistry samples were collected from the lake and analyzed in the laboratory. Additional analyses were conducted in support of laboratory experiments on zooplankton-fish interactions.
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