Assessing Metal Mine Effects using Benthic Invertebrates for Canada's Environmental Effects Program

Abstract

In Canada, the Metal Mining Effluent Regulation is a mechanism developed from the Fisheries Act (R.S., c. F-14, s.1) under which the effects of mine effluent on fish and fish habitat (i.e., benthic invertebrate communities) is determined by Environmental Effects Monitoring (EEM) studies. The Metal Mining EEM (MM EEM) program proceeds in a tiered manner, commencing with determining whether an effect is present and continuing with determining extent, magnitude and cause of the effect. The benthic invertebrate monitoring component of the MM EEM program includes consideration of study design elements such as confounding factors, monitoring frequency, statistical study design, appropriate community endpoints and standardized approaches to site descriptions, field and laboratory methods and data interpretation. We present the approaches and rationale recently adopted for the benthic component of Canada's Metal Mining EEM program. A primary objective of this program was to outline a consistent national program that was scientifically defensible and that would produce the necessary information to evaluate the effectiveness of current pollution regulations.

An Adaptive Environmental Effects Monitoring Framework for Assessing the Influences of Liquid Effluents on Benthos, Water, and Sediments in Aquatic Receiving Environments

“…The nature of the baseline and surveillance monitoring tiers is determined in part by the physical setting of the facility and associated discharge (e.g., discharge to a stream, lake, or marine embayment; see Glozier et al [2002] and Environment Canada [2012] for details). By contrast, the study design (also known as the experimental design or sampling design) is often determined by answers to a series of relatively simple questions (e.g., Green 1979;Quinn and Keough 2002;Underwood 1994).…”

“…As a result, Environment Canada acknowledged that the RCA (Figure 2) could be used as an alternate design in EEM (Glozier et al 2002;Environment Canada 2012). As a result, Environment Canada acknowledged that the RCA (Figure 2) could be used as an alternate design in EEM (Glozier et al 2002;Environment Canada 2012).…”

A tiered method for discriminant function analysis models for the Reference Condition Approach: model performance and assessment

“…1; Glozier et al 2002). In the case of YT and ACT data sets, timed sampling did not allow calculation of density, so abundance, standardized by sampling effort, was used.…”

“…This requirement includes monitoring the benthic macroinvertebrate (BMI) community (Walker et al 2003). BMI communities from sites exposed to mine effluent are compared to communities from unexposed reference areas and an effect is defined as a statistically significant difference between exposed and unexposed communities (Glozier et al 2002). …”

“…We assessed reference sites with 1 of 4 levels of simulated impacts (none to severe) with a series of biological metrics in a Test Site Analysis (TSA; Bowman and Somers 2006). A test site was deemed to be impaired when any of the metrics fell outside the normal range for the reference sites (e.g., Kilgour et al 1998, Glozier et al 2002. We used the 3 data sets to evaluate the ability of ANNA and RDA methods to assess impaired sites correctly.…”