Maryland Biological Stream Survey: A State Agency Program to Assess the Impact of Anthropogenic Stresses on Stream Habitat Quality and Biota

Klauda, Ronald J.; Kazyak, P.; Stranko, Scott A.; Southerland, Mark T.; Roth, N.; Chaillou, J.

doi:10.1007/978-94-011-4976-1_23

Cited by 34 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Data were collected by the staff of the Maryland Biological Stream Survey (MBSS; Klauda et al 1998) as part of a state-wide monitoring program to assess the biological integrity of Maryland's streams. These data were used in a previous study on analytical considerations for linking watershed land cover to ecological communities in streams (King et al 2005) and as a case study for validating TITAN (Baker and King 2010).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We used EPT because it and other taxonomic richness metrics are among the most widely used metrics of stream biological condition and have been used in recent threshold analyses (e.g., Evans-White et al 2009). We used B-IBI because it combines several univariate community metrics into an aggregate index and is directly applicable to management because it is used in Maryland to classify streams according to biological condition (Klauda et al 1998).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Considerations for analyzing ecological community thresholds in response to anthropogenic environmental gradients

King

Baker

2010

Journal of the North American Benthological Society

123

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Abstract. The goal of this paper is to help managers better understand implications of using aggregate community metrics, such as taxon richness or Indices of Biotic Integrity (IBI), for detecting threshold responses to anthropogenic environmental gradients. To illustrate, we offer an alternative analytical approach, Threshold Indicator Taxa ANalysis (TITAN), geared toward identifying synchronous changes in the distribution of multiple taxa as evidence of an ecological community threshold. Our approach underscores the fundamental reality that which taxa are affected by stressors is important, both from a conservation standpoint and because taxon-specific life-history traits help us understand relevant mechanisms. First, we examine macroinvertebrate community response to an impervious cover gradient using a well-studied biomonitoring data set to show that representative community metrics are relatively insensitive to synchronous threshold declines of numerous individual taxa. We then reproduce these response relationships using a simulated community data set with similar properties to demonstrate that linear or wedge-shaped responses of community metrics to anthropogenic gradients can occur as an artifact of aggregating multiple taxa into a single value per sampling unit, despite strong nonlinearity in community response. Our findings do not repudiate the use of community metrics or multimetric indices, but they challenge assumptions that such metrics are capable of accurately reflecting community thresholds across a broad range of anthropogenic gradients. We recommend an alternative analysis framework that begins with characterization of the responses of individual taxa and uses aggregation only after distinguishing the magnitude, direction, and uncertainty in the responses of individual members of the community.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Considerations for analyzing ecological community thresholds in response to anthropogenic environmental gradients

King

Baker

2010

Journal of the North American Benthological Society

123

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“…We used macroinvertebrate taxon abundance data from 1811 stream reaches sampled by the Maryland Biological Stream Survey (MBSS; Klauda et al 1998) and 128 stream reaches sampled by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). The MBSS is a stream-monitoring program based on probabilistic sampling stratified by major basins and stream order (first to third order on a 1:250 000 stream map during 1995-1997 and first to fourth order on a 1:100 000 stream map during [2000][2001][2002][2003].…”

Section: Stream Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

How novel is too novel? Stream community thresholds at exceptionally low levels of catchment urbanization

King

Baker

Kazyak

et al. 2011

Ecological Applications

147

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Abstract. Novel physical and chemical conditions of many modern ecosystems increasingly diverge from the environments known to have existed at any time in the history of Earth. The loss of natural land to urbanization is one of the most prevalent drivers of novel environments in freshwaters. However, current understanding of aquatic community response to urbanization is based heavily upon aggregate indicators of community structure and linear or wedge-shaped community response models that challenge ecological community theory. We applied a new analytical method, threshold indicator taxa analysis (TITAN), to a stream biomonitoring data set from Maryland to explicitly evaluate linear community response models to urbanization that implicitly assume individual taxa decline or increase at incrementally different levels of urbanization. We used TITAN (1) to identify the location and magnitude of greatest change in the frequency and abundance of individual taxa and (2) to assess synchrony in the location of change points as evidence for stream community thresholds in response to percent impervious cover in catchments. We documented clear and synchronous threshold declines of 110 of 238 macroinvertebrate taxa in response to low levels of impervious cover. Approximately 80% of the declining taxa did so between ;0.5% and 2% impervious cover, whereas the last 20% declined sporadically from ;2% to 25% impervious cover. Synchrony of individual responses resulted in distinct community-level thresholds ranging from 0.68% (mountains), 1.28% (piedmont), and 0.96% (coastal plain) impervious cover. Upper limits (95% confidence intervals) of community thresholds were ,2% cover in all regions. Within distinct physiographic classes, higher-gradient, smaller catchments required less impervious cover than lower gradient, larger catchments to elicit community thresholds. Relatively few taxa showed positive responses to increasing impervious cover, and those that did gradually increased in frequency and abundance, approximating a linear cumulative distribution. The sharp, synchronous declines of numerous taxa established a consistent threshold response at exceptionally low levels of catchment urbanization, and uncertainty regarding the estimation of impervious cover from satellite data was mitigated by several corroborating lines of evidence. We suggest that threshold responses of communities to urban and other novel environmental gradients may be more prevalent than currently recognized.

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“…We used only the first record for sites that were sampled more than once. Of the ,2500 samples, 1561 satisfied these conditions.In the MBSS survey, benthic macroinvertebrates were sampled with a D-frame net from all habitats within a 75-m stream reach (Klauda et al 1998), and subsampled to 100 organisms. Insects were identified to genus level (Southerland et al 2005b).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Classifying the biological condition of small streams: an example using benthic macroinvertebrates

Maloney

Weller

Russell

et al. 2009

Journal of the North American Benthological Society

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Abstract. The ability to classify the biological condition of unsurveyed streams accurately would be an asset to the conservation and management of streams. We compared the ability of 5 modeling methods (classification and regression trees, conditional inference trees, random forests [RF], conditional random forests [cRF], and ordinal logistic regression) to predict stream biological condition (very poor, poor, fair, or good) based on benthic macroinvertebrate Index of Biotic Integrity data taken from the Maryland Biological Stream Survey. Predictor variables included land use and land cover (e.g., impervious surface, row-crop agriculture, and population density) and landscape measures (annual precipitation and watershed area). We included 1561 sites on small nontidal streams in the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We used 1248 sites (80%) as a training data set to build models and 313 sites (20%) as an independent evaluation data set. RF and cRF models most accurately predicted observed integrity scores in the evaluation data set, but we selected the cRF as the best model because of weaknesses in the RF model (e.g., biased variable selection). Percent impervious surface was the most important variable in the cRF model, and the probability that a site was in very poor or poor biological condition increased rapidly as % impervious cover increased up to 20%. When applied to predict stream biological conditions in all 7908 small nontidal stream reaches in the study area, the cRF model predicted that 33.8% were in fair, 29.9% in good, 22.7% in poor, and 13.6% in very poor biological condition. Our analyses can be used to manage and conserve freshwater and estuarine resources of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Model predictions for unsurveyed streams can help target field studies to identify high-quality streams deserving of conservation and impaired streams in need of restoration.Key words: stream condition, landscape-scale, land use, random forests, conditional inference, classification and regression trees (CART), ordinal logistic regression, prediction.Biological assessments have shown that many small streams have been impaired by anthropogenic stressors (Benke 1990, USEPA 2000. These results have generated much interest in conserving and managing these streams and their watersheds. However, small streams are numerous (Leopold et al. 1964), and assessing the biological condition of all small streams is logistically impractical and cost prohibitive. Models that reliably predict biological conditions at unsurveyed locations are needed. One way to estimate regional biological conditions in streams and rivers is to extrapolate the observed proportions of impairment classifications from a sample of streams to all streams in a landscape (e.g., if 30% of the sampled sites are impaired, then 30% of the sites in the region are impaired; USEPA 2006 Classification and regression trees (Breiman 1984, De'ath and Fabricius 2000, Loh 2008 are statistical techniques that might be useful for constructi...

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Maryland Biological Stream Survey: A State Agency Program to Assess the Impact of Anthropogenic Stresses on Stream Habitat Quality and Biota

Cited by 34 publications

References 15 publications

Considerations for analyzing ecological community thresholds in response to anthropogenic environmental gradients

Considerations for analyzing ecological community thresholds in response to anthropogenic environmental gradients

How novel is too novel? Stream community thresholds at exceptionally low levels of catchment urbanization

Classifying the biological condition of small streams: an example using benthic macroinvertebrates

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