Poster Details
ASSESSING PATTERNS IN TAXONOMIC STRUCTURE OF INVERTEBRATE ASSEMBLAGES IN NON-PERENNIAL RIVERS AND STREAMS IN THE ARID SOUTHWESTERN U.S.
Non-perennial rivers and streams (NPRS) are considered waters of the United States, and therefore must be managed by the States. Perennial systems are expected to become more non-perennial as anthropogenic climate change increases, and therefore assessment methods are needed to support effective management. Methodologies to assess the ecological integrity on NPRS when dry are only beginning to be developed, but literature from the past decade suggests that terrestrial macroinvertebrates can be collected from NPRS and used to create ecological integrity metrics. As the first step of developing an Observed to Expected (O/E) index, we examined the biological structure of terrestrial invertebrate assemblages in NPRS. This examination will inform our decisions regarding which geographic areas can be included in O/E models in the near future. We created ordinations showing how structure of the invertebrate assemblages varied across 120 sample sites ranging from San Diego, California to Phoenix, Arizona. We then explored how taxonomic similarity among the major orders Formicidae, Araneae, and Coleoptera differed and how structure was related to important environmental gradients. These gradients can serve as predictors for defining the E in O/E indices in the future.
Andrew Caudillo (Primary Presenter/Author), California State University, Monterey Bay, ancaudillo@csumb.edu;
Matthew Robinson (Co-Presenter/Co-Author), California State University Monterey Bay, marobinson@csumb.edu;
John Olson (Co-Presenter/Co-Author), Dept of Applied Environmental Science, California State University Monterey Bay, CA, USA, joolson@csumb.edu;