Poster Details
ANALYSIS OF AQUATIC COMMUNITY STRUCTURE NEAR A LOWHEAD DAM
Eight lowhead dams have been historically installed along the Ottawa River to maintain higher water levels during dry periods of the year. The Jackson Street dam on the Ottawa River (Lima, Ohio) was sampled in late August from 2014-2017. This lowhead dam is a candidate for removal and one of the baffles has already been extracted from the the dam. The primary objective of this investigation was to survey the aquatic life above and below the dam to create a baseline dataset of the community structure prior to dam removal. Two riffle habitats were sampled downstream of the dam and one riffle was sampled upstream. At each site, the physical and chemical parameters were measured; periphyton, and macroinvertebrates were collected. Preliminary MANOVA and MRPP analyses indicated there is limited spatial significance between sites (upstream vs. downstream) sampled in a given year. However, there were significant (p<0.001) temporal variations between community structure found in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Future multivariate analyses will be utilized to incorporate the 2017 data to determine if this temporal variation continues and, if so, what significant environmental factors may be involved.
Robert Verb (Primary Presenter/Author), Ohio Northern University, r-verb@onu.edu;
Rody Seballos (Co-Presenter/Co-Author), Ohio Northern University, r-seballos@onu.edu;
Leslie Riley (Co-Presenter/Co-Author), Ohio Northern University, l-riley.1@onu.edu;