This past week at the Soltis Center, one of our focuses has been on combining our original research proposal into a more developed project by combining it with one or two other people who had complementary proposals. In my case this meant combining my proposal looking at ecosystem services of tropical streams based on land use type with a proposal looking at dragonflies and damselflies as bio-indicators of stream health based on land use and a proposal looking at abundance of poison dart frogs. It was fairly straightforward to combine these three ideas. The project that we will be working on during our time at Las Cruces is assessing the impact of land use on stream quality and the abundance of indicator species dragonflies, damselflies, and amphibians.
By looking at both water quality and bio-indicator species, we should be able to get a good measure of ecosystem health and how it differs with land use. The parameters of land use we will be looking at are stream discharge, temperature, pH, and suspended sediment levels. We will be measuring these things three times along a 1 kilometer transect of 9 streams (3 of each different land use type). Also along these transects, every 100 meters we will do a complete count of our indicator species seen within 5 minutes. A final component to our project is determining if acid rain plays a part in the pH of the streams. In order to do this we will place a rain gauge along each stream and will test the pH soon after a rain.
Stream ecosystem health relates to forest health as many species rely on the stream for various things. This study will provide a baseline of stream health for Las Cruces.