USU Scientist Edits Special Topics Journal, Receives EPA Grant

Research by Utah State University aquatic ecologist Charles “Chuck” Hawkins brought an invitation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to collaborate on the first nationwide assessment of the ecological health of the nation’s streams. That collaboration prompted an international science journal to devote an entire issue to the scientific challenges of conducting ecological assessments. The publication highlights new tools developed to address the monitoring and assessment requirements of the decades-old Clean Water Act.

Hawkins, professor in USU’s Department of Watershed Sciences and director of the Western Center for Monitoring and Assessment of Freshwater Ecosystems, was lead editor for the Journal of the North American Benthological Society’s Dec. 2008 special issue on the assessment of the nation’s stream ecosystems.

The December issue includes an array of articles, including seven authored or co-authored by Hawkins, that address challenges confronted in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-funded Wadeable Streams Assessment. Hawkins was among a small group of scientists conducting the study, concluded in 2006, that lay the groundwork for standardized measurement of the quality of varied water bodies throughout the nation.

“The vast majority of waters in our country have been altered by human activity,” Hawkins says. “But because scientists had no historical data to start from and no standardized protocol across individual states to follow for assessments, there was no way to measure whether efforts initiated by the 1972 Clean Water Act were making progress in cleaning up pollution or whether conditions were deteriorating.”

Hawkins’ role in the WSA involved development of one of the two standardized measures used to quantify biological integrity in streams — that is, the amount of biodiversity loss that has occurred at different sample sites and throughout the nation as a whole.

His measures, along with those provided by colleagues to measure water quality in terms of chemical and physical integrity, can be applied across diverse environments.

“Our work allowed us to identify where the knowledge gaps were and confront the headaches involved in conducting accurate assessments,” Hawkins says. “These efforts demonstrate the need for strong science to address applied problems.”

Hawkins’ stream assessment efforts continue. He and USU colleagues David Tarboton, professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Jiming Jin, assistant professor in watershed sciences, recently learned they will be awarded an EPA grant to fund their grant proposal, “Consequences of Global Climate Change for Stream Biodiversity and Implications for the Application and Interpretation of Biological Indicators of Aquatic Ecosystem Condition.”

The three-year study, which commences June 1, will assess how changes in stream temperature and hydrology associated with global and regional climate change will influence stream biodiversity and the performance and interpretation of the biological indicators used to determine if streams are meeting the quality goals of the Clean Water Act.

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