Suburban streams have the potential to be highly impacted by chemcials applied to residential lawns and landscapes. Insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides used to control various pest species around the home, are commonly detected in suburban streams as a result of runoff from rain events. In this study, the macroinvertebrate communities of six streams, four, flowing through residential neighborhoods and two reference streams outside the city limits, were assessed using a multimetric approach. Streams were also ranked using a pesticide toxicity index to determine if any impairment detected with macroinvertebrate data was related to pesticide exposure. Using nine metrics to assess the invertebrate community, four of the streams, including the two references, were statistically similar in > 78% of the metrics and can be considered non-impacted. One stream had 78% metric similarity with one reference stream but only 33% metric similarity with the other indicating that this stream might be moderately impacted. Another stream had < 23% metric similarity to the references and can be considered impacted. However, the two most impacted streams were not the most toxic based on the pesticide toxicity index ranking. This indicates that additional factors such as habitat, sedimentation, and other contaminants such as metals may have as much, if not more, of an effect on the macroinvertebrate communities in these suburban streams.
Keywords: Macroinvertebrates, Bioassessment
Back to Ten-Minute Papers, Section Cd. Behavior and Ecology, Cf. Quantitative Ecology
Back to Ten-Minute Papers, Section Ca, Cb, Cc, Cd, Ce, and Cf
Back to The 2003 ESA Annual Meeting and Exhibition