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Ahh, stream life in my home mountains, the Sierra Nevada - carnivorous plants, underwater photos, teamwork and sustained attention. I’ve been surveying streams and their tributaries with invertebrate biologists David Herbst, Bruce Medhurst and Ian Bell. We took an astonishing array of measurements from hundred-and-fifty meter sections at each stream, so that insect populations - the bugs who recycle fallen leaves and wood and a primary indicator of ecosystem resilience - can be correlated to changes in water and air temperature, shape of channel, flow velocity, water chemistry and other things. I joined them on four of twenty-four sites they've been monitoring every year, now six years in to a ten year project: a reference curve for environmental change. For the next ten days I have a desk in their lab; they’ll sort out the sampled algae and invertebrates and log numbers into databases while I draw, visit more streams, and write - considering how to bring aspects of their work to the average urban citizen.
More to come – but if you wish not to receive periodic updates, please let me know: it’s nothing personal! (click 'unsubscribe' at the bottom)
Todd
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Ian Bell doing a stream-side sort of aquatic insects from leafy debris
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