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Wetland Macroinvertebrate Monitoring
| Wetlands are rich ecosystems that provide critical habitat for birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, mollusks and other organisms, as well as providing many ecosystem services, such as water purification and flood prevention. About 40% of all species listed as threatened or endangered in the U.S. are dependent on wetlands for their survival. Over half of the 200 million acres of wetlands that existed before European settlement have been destroyed through filling, draining, or other methods. While there have been recent efforts to conserve wetlands, acreage is being lost each year, and remaining wetlands may be highly contaminated. There exists a need to be able to determine wetland health in a rapid and cost-effective manner. |
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Scientists and citizen monitoring groups around the country have begun to monitor the health of their wetlands using macroinvertebrates, diatoms, algae, amphibians and plants. Like in biomonitoring of streams, macroinvertebrates can be very good indicators of the overall health of a wetland because they are ubiquitous, readily sampled, and there exists many species with varying responses to pollutants. The Xerces Society has recently completed a pilot project, funded by the U.S. EPA Region 10 and The Mountaineers Foundation, to begin to develop the use of macroinvertebrates as a tool in wetland bioassessment in the Pacific Northwest. We collected invertebrates in 13 riverine-impounding wetlands in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. The main goals of the project were 1) to test a sampling method in one subclass of wetlands, 2) to characterize the macroinvertebrate community in least-impaired wetlands, 3) to evaluate the degree of variability that exists among least-impaired wetlands, and 4) to begin to identify invertebrate attributes that vary predictably along a gradient of human disturbance. Download the final report for this project (pdf, ~5 MB). We have also developed an interactive CD-Rom guide to Wetland invertebrate identification. This CD-Rom will includes a key to family for taxa commonly found in Pacific Northwest wetlands. |