Salmonfly Project Collaboration: Macroinvertebrate Report
If you follow along with us you probably caught the video from the end of August about our collaboration with The Salmonfly Project. A quick recap from that:
While the Salmonfly Project studies bug populations in rivers all over the West, BHRF maintains the only consistent bug monitoring program on the Big Hole River. This summer’s collaboration will help better inform our upcoming Baseline Bug Health report (shooting for early 2024) and add another watershed to the Salmonfly Project’s slate of ongoing bug studies throughout the Northern Rockies, as we all seek to better document the state of bug life in some of our most famous trout rivers. In time, a robust dataset will allow us to identify trends and share bioindicators with FWP Fisheries Biologists and other scientists.
We began working with The Salmonfly Project on a monitoring program design that will focus on some of the primary hatches that are field-identifiable in late summer and allow us to gain some additional understanding of invertebrate abundance in larger substrate habitats that are tricky to sample with the smaller Hess Sampler. It’s a project designed to fit into their region-wide documentation of bug status in well-known trout streams, but it will also help inform the findings of the ongoing bug project that we began on the Big Hole back in 2019 with the entomologists at River Continuum Concepts.
After a bit of time in the lab parsing out what our August fieldwork turned up, the scientists at The Salmonfly Project recently completed their initial report on that work. This is a project we’re hoping to continue funding each August.
In short, there’s lots happening with the macroinvertebrate portion of our water quality program!
*The production of this report could not have happened without the financial support provided by the George Grant Chapter of Trout Unlimited in Butte, MT
