Forest Co-op Bio-Indicators of Forest Stream Health Project
Forested watersheds provide reliable sources of clean surface and groundwater supplies, and contribute to sustaining healthy aquatic ecosystems across forest landscapes. Because of strong ecological linkages between forest water bodies and their surrounding terrestrial catchments, industrial activities such as logging could affect water quality, aquatic habitats, and biological communities. The development and refinement of sustainable forest management regulations require an understanding of watershed susceptibilities and the processes that may pose a risk of harm to aquatic environments. In particular, where forest management regulations require movement toward emulating natural disturbance patterns on the landscape, it is essential to understand whether those regulations result in watershed impacts beyond the effects of natural disturbance.
To assist in understanding these risks and processes, ecologically-relevant indicators of aquatic ecosystem responses to watershed disturbance are required. The Forest Co-op Bio-Indicators of Forest Stream Health project is testing a potential bio-indicator that could be used for effectiveness monitoring, an integrated indicator of forest stream health that combines assessment of ecosystem function with measures of aquatic community structure. It focuses on the decomposition of organic matter (a critical ecosystem process linked to food webs in forest streams) and the associated microbial and aquatic invertebrate communities. The project is being conducted in and near the White River Forest Management Unit in northcentral Ontario.
The objectives of the project are to:
• compare riparian and stream habitat characteristics across logging-disturbed (5 to 15 years old), fire-disturbed (11 years old), and not recently-disturbed (about 60+ years) catchments,
• apply the bio-indicator approach using standardized leaf packs deployed in streams across the three treatment groups, with focus on biodiversity of invertebrates and microbes
• measure dissolved and particulate organic matter fluxes and characteristics across the treatment groups,
• apply a modeling approach to determine which riparian and catchment characteristics across the treatment groups are most associated with in-stream conditions and communities, and
• link to the NSERC-supported partner project investigating the role of forest carbon and cations in the recovery of industrially-damaged watersheds in the Sudbury region
The second field season has been completed including all stream, riparian, and upland habitat surveys, two years of leaf pack invertebrate collections, standardized benthic sampling, and continuous water level and temperature monitoring. Underway are GIS analysis, water level and temperature analysis and invertebrate sorting and analysis. The project forms the basis of research by one Ph.D. student, one post-grad research assistant (Laurentian University), and one MSc. student (Royal Roads University), and contributes to a second Ph.D. student and MSc. student at Laurentian University.