(Radio Iowa) – The Iowa D-N-R will once again conduct biological assessments of Iowa streams to determine their ecological status and health. Environmental Specialist Ken Krier says they do a survey of fish and other species in the water. “It’s your snails, your leeches, all your aquatic insects, crayfish, things like that. And we do a habitat assessment, which is mainly an in-stream and near-stream habitat assessment, and we do collect just a single water quality grab sample,” he says.
The federal Clean Water Act requires states to monitor waterways Krier says they’ve done the biological survey since 1994. “All of these data that get collected for this contract, especially, …and a majority of the in-stream fish fisheries data are in our on line database BioNet. You can access if you have, internet access anywhere in the world to look at all of these data, all of the different fish bugs have, water quality,” he says. Krier says you can search out individual fish like the darter.
“You can go on there and search for the Iowa darter. It tells you, it gives you the schematic, it gives any photos that we have and you can go to all the sites, click on them, find out where the Iowa darter or any other fish species we have collected,” Krier says. Krier says the state survey does a better job in surveying Iowa streams than national surveys because they’ve developed a good system.
“The Cedar Wapsi area of our state, it’s called the 47-C ecoregion. They had to write separate rules to the models because the quality of the fish and bugs were so good in that part and actually the part of the region,” he says. “They were better than, you know, a lot a lot of the region that include Missouri, campus, Nebraska. So goes to show you we have some struggles in the state for sure, but I think it’s important that we go out, we collect high quality data.”
The state Environment Protection Commission recently approved 575-thousand dollars in funding for the program.
