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Benjamin A Schlifer

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The Long Term Resource Monitoring (LTRM) program employs a destructive harvest method for sampling aquatic vegetation whereby a rake is dragged ~1.5 m over the substrate and plant materials are retrieved. The density of each species of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV), and of all species combined, are scored based on the amount of plant material collected on the teeth of each rake. Plant density (PD) scores are ordered and vary from 0 (no plants captured) to 5 (80-100% of rake teeth covered). The PD score of 1 has represented the vast majority of all non-zero values since 1998 and is associated with a wide range of biomass (e.g. <1g to 694g fresh weight in Pools 4 and 8 during the 2017 field season). However,...
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Estimation of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) biomass was evaluated using field data collected in 2017, and targeted analyses of three existing data sets: 1) Yin and Kreiling (2001), Drake et al. (2016), and 3) LTRM vegetation data (1998 – 2017). Two field studies were completed in 2017. The first targeted SAV biomass in raked plots and was conducted in collaboration with USFWS annual Lake Onalaska Vallisneria americana monitoring. In the second study, fresh weights of raked SAV were recorded at approximately 10% of LTRM Pools 4 and 8 2017 sampling sites.
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Backwaters and other floodplain waterbodies are rare within the Middle Mississippi River. The lack of these habitats likely influences water quality, nutrient processing, and communities of organisms. In early 2016 a major flood event breached two levees south of Cape Girardeau, MO resulting in the creation of two new backwaters. Water quality, metabolic rate, and fish community data were collected from the new backwaters as well as an isolated floodplain lake.
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The Long-Term Resource Monitoring element (LTRM) of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program (UMRR) has conducted aquatic vegetation and water quality surveys in several navigation pools since the mid 1990’s. Over a 20-year period (1998-2017), the off-channel (i.e. backwater) areas in upper Pool 4 remained chronically turbid and supported a limited submersed macrophyte community with high between-year variability in the proportion of sites where submersed plants were observed. Water surface elevation and discharge rates also fluctuated substantially within- and between-years in the upper pool. Pearson correlation analysis indicated that between-year change in the proportion of sites where submersed macrophytes...
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