Effects of flow alteration on ecological health of streams across the Atlantic Highlands Ecoregion

Problem: The Clean Water Act (PL 92-500) requires that the health of the Nation’s rivers and streams be assessed on a regular basis, and in the Northeast such assessments often use information from aquatic biological communities that live in the stream. Biomonitoring programs implemented by individual states evaluate biological data to assess stream health on the premise that certain sensitive species that are native to the region cannot survive when water quality is poor. The aquatic community data are typically condensed into a set of biological condition metrics that are scaled numerically to convey the relative degree of stream impairment (e.g., excellent, good, fair, poor). However, biological condition...

Categories: Data, Project; Types: Downloadable, Map Service, OGC WFS Layer, OGC WMS Layer, Shapefile; Tags: Atlantic Highlands Ecoregion,NY,VT,NH,ME,MA,CT,NJ,PA, Ecological Assessment of Human and Natural Impacts, Ecological Assessment of Human and Natural Impacts, Ecological Assessment of Human and Natural Impacts, Ecosystem Health, All tags... Ecosystem Health, National Water Quality Assessment Program, USGS New York Water Science Center, WSC, Water Quality, Water Quality, Water quality, biomonitoring, stream-flow, temperature, Fewer tags