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Sieg, Julie; Muller, Sienna

Urbanization is known to lead to aquatic ecosystem degradation through pollution, eutrophication, and runoff. While the literature quantifies the health of these ecosystems by measuring the effect of abiotic variables over long time scales in relation to the watershed’s percent impervious surface coverage, the relationship between urbanization, abiotic stream health indicators, and macroinvertebrate assemblages is poorly understood. This study explores two streams with historically similar conditions but present-day distinctions due to urbanization: Seymour River and Still Creek. Temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and conductivity measurements were conducted alongside benthic surveys of macroinvertebrate assemblages. Through principal component analysis, impervious surfaces were found to be positively correlated with conductivity and temperature and negatively correlated with dissolved oxygen levels. Seymour River was found to support a more diverse range of environment-sensitive macroinvertebrates whereas Still Creek hosted a less diverse population of pollution-tolerant taxa, with EPT (taxa within Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera genuses) to total invertebrate indexes of 0.979 and 0 respectively. Abiotic indicators of stream health were determined to be applicable at both sites, revealing a correlation between less urbanized waterways and healthier aquatic ecosystems. The findings suggest that a stream watershed’s percent impervious surface coverage more greatly influences its health than the localized land use around each site.

Text

University of British Columbia. Science One Research Projects; University of British Columbia. SCIE 001

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0432575

Science, Faculty of

Undergraduate

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