Brown Bag Seminar: Setting Instream Flow Targets in California Using Biological Community Health Indices
Speaker: Eric Stein, Principal Scientist, Biology Department Southern California Coastal Water Research Project
The seminar will be on development of flow-ecology relationships to inform instream flow management.
Changes to instream flow are known to be one of the major factors that affect the health of biological communities. Regulatory, monitoring, and management programs are increasingly using biological community composition, particularly benthic invertebrates, as a measure of instream conditions, stormwater project performance, or regulatory compliance with NPDES or other requirements and regulations. Understanding the relationship between changes in flow and changes in benthic invertebrate communities is, therefore, critical to informing decisions about ecosystem vulnerability, causes of stream and watershed degradation, and priorities for future watershed management. This talk will describe the development of tools and approaches for establishing instream flow target based on regional relationships between changes in hydrology and stream health (as measured by benthic invertebrate community composition). Illustrations from pilot applications in southern California will be presented.
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