Citizen science and benthic macroinvertebrate population trends in the mountains of western north carolina

Abstract

Citizen science and the efforts of volunteer data collectors provide an enormous amount of data to non-profits and government agencies at all levels across many scientific fields. Volunteer freshwater biomonitoring programs around the world have trained and used volunteers to collect, count, and identify benthic macroinvertebrates. Benthic macroinvertebrates have a variety of sensitivities to pollutants and certain groups' presence, absence, and population trends can be used to infer water quality. The Environmental Quality Institute (EQI) in western North Carolina has been collecting benthic macroinvertebrate data using volunteers for over a decade. Data from EQI were imported into a single data set using the statistical program R. These data were used to calculate volunteer identification accuracy and plot changes in benthic community composition across physiographic variables over time. Of the 71% of quality control samples that were of high quality, volunteers had 86% agreement in identifications when compared to a professional biologist. Volunteer data was used to assess differences in mean richness, abundance, and EPT richness at high and low elevation sites and at agricultural and non-agricultural sites. High elevation sites have significantly higher richness, abundance, and EPT richness, while high agriculture sites have significantly lower EPT richness. This suggests that the dataset is relatively robust and can support meaningful evaluation of trends in ecosystem health. As funding for government sponsored water quality monitoring continues to be decreased, well-trained volunteer monitors will need to continue providing supplemental data to decision makers. This project highlights the usefulness of organizations like EQI and the potential for the data that their volunteers collect.