Poster Details
DRAGONFLY DISTRIBUTION CHANGES MAY INDICATE CLIMATE CHANGE IN NORTH DAKOTA
Climate change can be indicated by changes in aquatic organism distributions due to the alteration of water quality, changes in thermal regimes, and habitat alteration. Dragonflies are excellent indicators for aquatic habitat quality because they live in water as larvae and can fly, and therefore migrate, as adults. If conditions don’t suit them, they can move to more habitable conditions. The goal of this project is to establish a baseline distribution of dragonfly species across North Dakota in order to compare to past and future distributions. We have pulled together past data for the state, begun collecting our own adult and larval specimens, and are utilizing a set of voucher collections from bioassessment projects dating back 20 years to pull larval specimens and identify to species. Our data shows at least seven newly recorded species for the state. Whether these new records are due to a lack of previous surveys or they represent new distributions is currently unknown. In the future, we hope to correlate changes in distributions with changes in water quality and climate data.
Hayden Zander (Primary Presenter/Author), Valley City State University, hayden.j.zander@vcsu.edu;
Andre DeLorme ( Co-Presenter/Co-Author), Department of Science, Valley City State University, andre.delorme@vcsu.edu;