Stream restoration in the Chesapeake Bay watershed: Data synthesis and analysis of interviews with practitioners

The Chesapeake Bay is the focus of a high profile restoration program and river restoration is one part of the strategy. A comprehensive database of over 4700 stream restoration projects across the watershed was compiled to examine where money is spent, what issues motivate restoration, and what approaches are used. The majority of projects were implemented to restore riparian vegetation and improve water quality. While over $400 million has been spent on stream restoration projects since 1990, less than 6% of written project records indicated that related monitoring had occurred. Comprehensive interviews with project managers were conducted for a subsample projects to characterize patterns in project goals, design, expenditures, project evaluation, and project success. Interviewed practitioners reported that the majority of projects were initiated to address environmental degradation, 70% were linked to other projects within the same watershed, and 76% of projects had some form of associated monitoring

Restoring Rivers One Reach at a Time: Results from a Survey of U.S. River Restoration Practitioners

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72915/1/j.1526-100X.2007.00244.x.pd

Appendix B. Physical data for study sites collected during Summer 2006.

Physical data for study sites collected during Summer 2006

Appendix A. Chemical and physical characteristics for summer 2006 and winter 2007 sampling days.

Chemical and physical characteristics for summer 2006 and winter 2007 sampling days

Appendix C. Study site species lists.

Study site species lists

In search of microbial indicator taxa: shifts in stream bacterial communities along an urbanization gradient

A majority of environmental studies describe microbiomes at coarse scales of taxonomic resolution (bacterial community, phylum), ignoring key ecological knowledge gained from finer-scales and microbial indicator taxa. Here, we characterized the distribution of 940 bacterial taxa from 41 streams along an urbanization gradient (0%–83% developed watershed area) in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina (USA). Using statistical approaches derived from macro-organismal ecology, we found that more bacterial taxa were classified as intolerant than as tolerant to increasing watershed urbanization (143 vs 48 OTUs), and we identified a threshold of 12.1% developed watershed area beyond which the majority of intolerant taxa were lost from streams. Two bacterial families strongly decreased with urbanization: Acidobacteriaceae (Acidobacteria) and Xanthobacteraceae (Alphaproteobacteria). Tolerant taxa were broadly distributed throughout the bacterial phylogeny, with members of the Comamonadaceae family (Betaproteobacteria) presenting the highest number of tolerant taxa. Shifts in microbial community structure were strongly correlated with a stream biotic index, based on macroinvertebrate composition, suggesting that microbial assemblages could be used to establish biotic criteria for monitoring aquatic ecosystems. In addition, our study shows that classic methods in community ecology can be applied to microbiome datasets to identify reliable microbial indicator taxa and determine the environmental constraints on individual taxa distributions along environmental gradients

Appendix B. Example habitat transition maps and photos for study site block 1.

Example habitat transition maps and photos for study site block 1

Appendix A. Study site UTM coordinates.

Study site UTM coordinates