Effects of land use and invasive fishes on prairie pothole wetland condition

Evaluating alternative macroinvertebrate sampling methodologies in wetlands: Influence of sieve mesh size on relationships between environmental and assemblage variables

“…Additionally, the relatively small area enclosed by the stovepipe can be exhaustively sampled and generate more accurate estimates of abundance and taxonomic diversity than other sampling methods (Turner and Trexler 1997;USEPA 2002;Meyer et al 2011). Previous studies employing stovepipe sampling demonstrated that macroinvertebrate taxonomic richness and numerical densities in Iowa Prairie Pothole wetlands were highly correlated with other indicators of wetland condition, including fish biomass, turbidity, and areal cover by plants (Hentges and Stewart 2010;Maurer et al 2014;Sundberg 2016). Although stovepipe sampling can produce relatively accurate values for wetland macroinvertebrate metrics, time required to process samples retained by the standard 500-µm mesh sieve is still too extensive for this method to be widely used in wetland monitoring (Turner and Trexler 1997;Meyer at al.…”

“…Abundance of free-floating, floating-leaved, emergent, and submerged nonvascular and vascular macroscopic plants was quantified as total area covered by plants (plant cover; Goldsmith and Harrison 1976;Richardson and Vymazal 2001;Maurer et al 2014;Sundberg 2016). Plant surveys occurred on one date in each wetland between June 30 and July 23.…”