Poster Details
ASSESSING TEMPORARY STREAMS IN CALIFORNIA: ARE BRYOPHYTES STABLE INDICATORS OF DRY STREAM HEALTH?
Climate change is making dry streams more common worldwide. It has become increasingly important to develop an accurate method of assessing the ecological health of dry streams in regions experiencing prolonged periods of drought. Our research aims to determine if terrestrial bryophytes can be used as a stable indicator of stream health for intermittent streams in Southern California. Bryophytes are sensitive to human activity and have been used in previous studies as biological indicators of stream health, changes in hydrology and changes in stability. They also commonly occur in non-perennial streams. For these reasons, we incorporated bryophytes into a bioassessment method we developed for use in dry streams. But the temporal stability of bryophytes as bioindicators is unknown. To test the stability of bryophytes as indicators we collected and identified samples from 10 sites during a dry year (2016) and a wet year (2017). We then evaluated if the metrics used to assess human disturbance were affected by this inter-annual variability by comparing how much metric scores changed between years. This study is an important step toward adapting bioassessment methods for use in increasingly common dry streams.
Megan Rodenbeck (Primary Presenter/Author), California State University Monterey Bay, mrodenbeck@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;