The utility of examining changes in macroinvertebrate communities in order to assess water quality is well established.  These communities often change in response to human-induced disturbances and tend to be the main indicator of choice when designing bioassessment protocols and indices of biotic integrity.  Although these methods have been successful in improving the efficacy of biological monitoring in streams and rivers, most are limited to these habitats and cannot be applied to other freshwater habitats, such as wetlands.  Furthermore, no assessments exist which integrate these different types.

               In the case of floodplain wetlands (and others in the riparian zone), this integration is crucial in order to properly ascertain a freshwater system’s true ecological integrity.  Many hydrologists consider a river and its floodplain as one unit since they are inseparable with respect to their water, sediment, and organic budgets.  Simply monitoring the stream reveals only a portion of what’s happening to the system.  It is the system, with all the individual factors working together, that determines the biological community.   

               The purpose of my current research is to create a Floodplain Invertebrate Community Index (F-ICI) that can be integrated with existing stream assessments to enable scientists to simultaneously and effectively gauge the biological integrity of freshwater ecosystems.  Doing this requires several steps.  First, I examine stream and floodplain invertebrate communities for inherent differences.  If floodplain assemblages vary extensively from those found in streams, I then determine if these unique floodplain communities provide additional information that could prove valuable for assessment purposes.  This leads to the third step of testing whether or not floodplain communities and their corresponding metrics respond accordingly across a disturbance gradient.  I rank sites along this disturbance gradient by evaluating the physical habitat, apparent onsite stressors and water chemistry, and by determining land usage within the surrounding area and upstream in the watershed.  In addition, I also investigate the possible effects of ecoregion and stream size on Pennsylvania floodplain metrics.  The integration of this information should result in an important tool for assisting researchers in evaluating impacts to stream/floodplain systems.

               My future goals involve the addition of macroinvertebrate metrics for slope wetlands, and eventually the compilation of a Riparian Invertebrate Community Index.  This index will incorporate wetlands normally found within a stream’s riparian zone.  These various wetland types are quite different and consequently support different macroinvertebrate communities.  Therefore, the macroinvertebrate index will have several components, each geared toward the type of wetland being assessed.