Abstract. Emergent plants can be suitable indicators of anthropogenic stress in coastal wetlands if their responses to natural environmental variation can be parsed from their responses to human activities in and around wetlands. We used hierarchical partitioning to evaluate the independent influence of geomorphology, geography, and anthropogenic stress on common wetland plants of the U.S. Great Lakes coast and developed multi-taxa models indicating wetland condition. A seven-taxon model predicted condition relative to watershedderived anthropogenic stress, and a four-taxon model predicted condition relative to withinwetland anthropogenic stressors that modified hydrology. The Great Lake on which the wetlands occurred explained an average of about half the variation in species cover, and subdividing the data by lake allowed us to remove that source of variation. We developed lake-specific multi-taxa models for all of the Great Lakes except Lake Ontario, which had no plant species with significant independent effects of anthropogenic stress. Plant responses were both positive (increasing cover with stress) and negative (decreasing cover with stress), and plant taxa incorporated into the lake-specific models differed by Great Lake. The resulting models require information on only a few taxa, rather than all plant species within a wetland, making them easier to implement than existing indicators.
Brady, Valerie J.; Brown, Terry N.; Ciborowski, Jan J.H.; Danz, Nicholas P.; Ghioca, Dana M.; Hanowski, JoAnn M.; Hollenhorst, Tom P.; Howe, Robert W.; Johnson., Lucinda B.; Johnston, Carol A.; and Reavie, Euan D., "Development of ecological indicators for the U.S. Great Lakes coastal region -A summary of applications in Lake Huron" (2009 Niemi et al. / Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management 12 (2009) [77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89] useful indicators of the ecological condition of the Lake Huron coast. The ecological indicators provide a baseline on selected conditions for the U.S. Lake Huron coastal region and a means to detect change over time.
Standardized, effective sampling methods are required to monitor amphibian population trends and community composition.Funnel traps have been used to ostensibly estimate species richness and relative abundance of larval amphibians. We tested whether funnel traps can be used to provide unbiased estimates of amphibian community composition in playa wetlands by comparing seining-dip netting and passive funnel-trapping results. Plains spadefoots (Spea bombifrons) were more prone to be captured in funnel traps whereas New Mexico spadefoots (S. multiplicata) were less likely captured by funnel traps than by seines and dip nets. In playas funnel traps should be used only for collecting specimens and not for estimating amphibian community composition. (JOURNAL OF WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT 71(3): 991-995; 2007)
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