In spite of regulatory efforts, water quality in many South Carolina streams does not meet standards of public health and biological integrity. Stream monitoring continues to reveal significant impairment of the structure of lotic communities.
In order to understand and to predict the reactions of stream ecosystems to natural and anthropogenic impacts, mathematical models of aquatic biological communities are frequently built. These models, the key part of ecological prognosis, provide a basis for testing alternative management scenarios of aquatic ecosystem behavior.
Many models of aquatic ecosystems considered fish as indicators of "environmental quality". However, the status of the streams is more accurately reflected by the ecological integrity of their macroinvertebrate community. Through its integration of the effects of different stressors over time, the macroinvertebrate community provides a measure of the aggregate impact of stressors, and a measure of the influence of fluctuating environmental conditions.
Prognosis of biomass dynamics of aquatic insects will be provided on the structural and mathematical levels. The structural level reflects the main logical links of the populations to their environment and may be applied to help direct management decisions to maintain appropriate community functioning. The mathematical model, based on second-order differential equation, describes the population as a freely oscillating system and allows us to predict dynamics of population biomass given different land-use strategies. We will provide examples of the model implementation using aquatic macroinvertebrate data collected in South Carolina streams.
Keywords: structure, model
The ESA 2001 Annual Meeting - 2001: An Entomological Odyssey of ESA