Abstract
The benthic macroinvertebrate population of a stream in an urbanized watershed was compared to the benthos in a rural stream. Using buried samplers, no significant difference between streams was found in total numbers of invertebrates, indicating no long term loss of colonization potential in the urban stream. Classifying the benthos in functional family groupings (based on Cummins, 1973) showed the rural stream to have nearly twice the functional diversity of the urban stream. The benthos of the urban stream was dominated by a few groups of invertebrates which could adapt to the erosional/depositional nature of the substrate and could utilize transient, low quality food sources. The density of invertebrates was adequate to support a coho salmon and cutthroat trout population in the urban stream. Apparently, the salmonids feed on available benthos and do not select specific benthic trophic groups. An evaluation of six similarity coefficients using cluster analysis showed that only the Canberra Metric index was able to represent the raw data according to known data associations.
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Pedersen, E.R., Perkins, M.A. The use of benthic invertebrate data for evaluating impacts of urban runoff. Hydrobiologia 139, 13–22 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00770238
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00770238