Angelo Coast Range Reserve

07 Jul, 03 AM - 09 Jul, 08 AM

To maintain natural resources and environmental quality, resource managers need tools to estimate the consequences of physical alterations to managed ecosystems for valued biological resources such as salmonid fish populations. Challenges in developing such tools include the potential for indirect effects of physical alterations on populations of interest, for example through the food supply for those populations, and the potential for cumulative effects of multiple physical alterations, such as changes in both suspended sediment and water temperature regimes. Current management approaches addressing the effects of suspended sediment and other physical factors on stream fish populations do not address the challenges above and in general do not provide estimates of population-level consequences. The proposed research will address interactions among suspended sediment, stream invertebrates and the feeding success of salmonid fish through a combination of field measurements and laboratory experiments. This information, and continuous field measurements of discharge and turbidity and other physical data at six sites within a single drainage covering a range of stream sizes and levels of suspended sediment, will be used to assemble spatially explicit, individual-based models of salmonid fish populations. The models will simulate both individual stream reaches and networks of stream reaches that reflect real-world variation in the spatio-temporal distribution of physical conditions in streams. These models will be used to quantitatively evaluate the population-level consequences of altered suspended regimes and their interactions with other common physical alterations in managed ecosystems. This approach should significantly advance efforts to manage natural resources, by identifying patterns in physical processes that allow persistence of valued animal populations. At the Angelo Preserve, the project would include gathering continuous temperture, turbidity and discharge data for sites on the SF Eel River and Elder Creek, and gathering physical data to support hydraulic simulation models for both sites.

Visit #5582 @Angelo Coast Range Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 4384 | Research

Sediment dynamics in managed ecosystems: linking physical processes to biological consequences

professional - US Forest Service

Reservation Members(s)

Group of 3 Research Assistant (non-student/faculty/postdoc) Jul 7 - 9, 2004 (3 days)
Bret Harvey Jul 7 - 9, 2004 (3 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice

HQ House 4 Jul 7 - 9, 2004