. Baseline assessment and analysis of fish, macroinvertebrates and herpetofauna in the Otter Creek coal tracts area of Powder River County. Aquatic ecology; Aquatic invertebrates; Fishes; Amphibians; Reptiles. in-stream habitat, and characteristics that influence aquatic community integrity. The sites ranking higher using these protocols are determined to have higher quality local-scale habitat. Habitat assessments were performed during the same visit as the biological sampling. Macroinvertebrate Communities Macroinvertebrate communities were sampled qualitatively from the 10 transects within
. Baseline assessment and analysis of fish, macroinvertebrates and herpetofauna in the Otter Creek coal tracts area of Powder River County. Aquatic ecology; Aquatic invertebrates; Fishes; Amphibians; Reptiles. in-stream habitat, and characteristics that influence aquatic community integrity. The sites ranking higher using these protocols are determined to have higher quality local-scale habitat. Habitat assessments were performed during the same visit as the biological sampling. Macroinvertebrate Communities Macroinvertebrate communities were sampled qualitatively from the 10 transects within the 300m assessment reach using the EMAP Reach-Wide protocol (Lazorchak et al. 1998). Sampling started at the downstream transect (A) or #10 in the BLM protocol, and proceeded upstream alternating sampling with the 500-micron D-frame net to the left, right or center of the stream channel, so a random sampling of all habitats is achieved (Figure 2). Ten multi-habitat kicks were composited from the net into a 20 liter bucket. All organisms and organic matter in the bucket were elutriated from the inorganic portion Figure 2. Macroinvertebrate EMAP Sampling procedure .. and washed onto a 500-micron sieve. The inorganic portion was washed and examined until no further organics or organisms were present and discarded. The organic portion on the sieve was transferred to one or two 1 liter Nalgene bottles (unless field sub- sampling was needed), labeled and preserved in 95% ethanol and brought to the MTNHP lab in Helena for processing (sorting, identification and data analysis) following protocols outlined by the BLM (2008a) and MTDEQ (2006). Macroinvertebrates were identified to the lowest taxonomic level (MTDEQ 2006), counted, imported into EDAS (Jessup 2006), and biological metrics were calculated from the data using the Montana Department of Environmental Quality's newest multimetric macroinvertebrate (MMI) protocols (Jessup et al. 2005, Feldman 2006). Metric results were scored us
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Keywords: ., bo, booksubjectamphibians, booksubjectfishes, booksubjectreptiles
