Rivers benthic invertebrate

Woodward, D.F., W.G. Brumbaugh, A.J. Deloney, E.E. Little, and C.E. Smith. 1994. Effects on rainbow trout fry of a metals-contaminated diet of benthic invertebrates from the Clark Fork River, Montana. Trans. Amer. Fish. Soc. 123 51-62. 

In alpine regions, especially in maritime climates, snow depths may be considerable. This insulates the stream environment from subzero temperatures. River ice is an important environmental component of alpine rivers and has resulted in adaptive mechanisms among the fauna [50, 51]. Despite these adaptations, winter conditions inevitably cause high mortality to stream invertebrates and fish, especially in reaches with unstable snow and ice cover and thereby susceptible to formation of frazil and anchor ice. The lack of winter ice cover in lake outflows and groundwater-fed reaches provides a favourable environment for primary producers and those benthic invertebrates utilising primary production [52]. 

Woodward, D.F., A.M. Farag, H.L. Bergman, A.J. DeLonay, E.E. Little, C.E. Smith, and F.T. Barrows. 1995. Metals-contaminated benthic invertebrates in the Clark Eork River, Montana effects on age-0 brown trout and rainbow trout. Canad. Jour. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 52 1994-2004. 

Canfield, T.J., Brunson, E.L., Dwyer, F.J., Ingersoll, C.G. and Kemble, N.E. (1998) Assessing sediments from Upper Mississippi River navigational pools using a benthic invertebrate community evaluation and the sediment quality triad approach, Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 35 (2), 202-212. 

This approach was applied by Fore (2003), who developed impact-specific multimetric indices using benthic invertebrates, which were used to identify specific causes of impacts due to metal contamination in rivers flowing through hard-mining areas in Colorado. 

Jones DS, Barnthouse LW, Suter GW, Efroymson RA, Field JM, Beauchamp JJ. 1999. Ecological risk assessment in a large river-reservoir 3. Benthic invertebrates. Environ Toxicol Chem 18 599-609. 

Quinn JM, Hickey CW. 1994. Hydraulic parameters and benthic invertebrate distributions in two gravel-bed New Zealand rivers. Freshwater Biol 32 489-500. 

Gardner, W.S., Escobar-Broines, E., Cruz-Kaegi, E., and Rowe, G.T. (1993) Ammonium excretion by benthic invertebrates and sediment-water nitrogen flux in the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi River outflow. Estuaries 16, 799-808. 

Carey AG Jr (1972) Ecolo cal observations on the benthic invertebrates from the central Oregon continental shelf. In Pmter AT and Alverson DL, eds. The Columbia River Estuary and Adjacent Ocean Waters Bioenvironmental Studies, p. 422. University of Washington Press. 

The Columbia River supports a large diverse community of planktonic and benthic invertebrates, fish, and other communities (DOE-RL 1990). 

In the second publication (Bombardier and Blaise, 2000), laboratory toxicity data derived from two larger projects conducted on freshwater sediments were integrated in the SED-TOX index and it was field validated using four benthic community metrics (species richness, number of taxa in the orders Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera, the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, and the ICI-SL which is a version of the Invertebrate Community Index modified for the St. Lawrence River). 

Figure 2. Relationship between SED-TOX scores and benthic community metrics. Scores for each metric are classified as follows A) Richness < 17 = degraded, 17-23 = moderately degraded, 24-32 = fairly clean, > 33 = clean (taken from Willsie, 1993a, b) B) H < 1 = degraded, 1-3 = moderately degraded > 3 = clean (Wilhm, 1967) C) EPT < 6 = degraded, 7-13 = fairly clean (taken from U.S. EPA, 1996a) D) 0 16 = clean (adapted from Willsie, 1993a, b). EPT taxa richness in the orders Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera ICI-SL Invertebrate community Index for the St. Lawrence River.

EN ISO 8689-1 Water quality - Biological classification of rivers - Part 1 Guidance on the interpretation of biological quality data from surveys of benthic macro-invertebrates in running waters (ISO 8689-1 2000) 2000 Under review... 

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