BOARD00568

• Board Meeting Date: 1/27/2004
• Description: ISF Section - Instream Flow Appropriations - Thirtyone Mile Creek
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

INTRODUCTION

The goal of the Clean Water Act is to preserve and restore the biological
integrity of aquatic resources. Monitoring is a tool we use to measure our
management successes and failures and base our resource allocation adjustments on
to meet this goal. Under the Clean Water Act federal agencies have the
responsibility for monitoring water quality on federally managed lands.

Aquatic macroinvertebrates are an important component of aquatic ecosystems and
have long been used to evaluate water quality. Among all the components of an
aquatic ecosystem they are one of the best suited for monitoring and basing
resource decisions on because they are numerous in almost all streams and lakes;
they respond to changing environmental conditions, either natural or anthropogenic;
they are readily collected and identified; they are not very mobile; they have
sufficiently long life cycles to enable effects to be integrated over an annual
period; and they provide a vital link in the food chain between primary producers
(algae and macrophytes) and fish. They have also been shown to be a cost
effective monitoring tool for evaluating the effects of management changes on
stream and riparian condition.

This report provides a general assessment of the aquatic ecosystem based on the
aquatic macroinvertebrate community. It was assumed the sampling area was
representative of a larger area. The information provided should be integrated
with other data collected in the watershed to gain a more complete understanding
of pollution sources, impacts, and trends.

SAMPLING LOCATIONS

The information in this report is based on data collected at the sites listed
below. Additional site location and management information for each site is shown
in Table 1.

station
3l-MILE-l
CURRANT-l

Name
31 Mile Creek
Currant Creek

County

I I