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Creek Comparisons

Monitoring doesn't have to be daunting. Last summer, a professor and two students compared East Bay stream sections in various stages of restoration using creek critters benthic macroinvertebrates in less than two months and at a cost of under $4,000.

"Millions of dollars are being spent on restoration projects," says Vince Resh, professor of aquatic entemology at U.C. Berkeley. "But without monitoring you really don't know what's working."

Resh collected benthic macroinvertebrates from two sections of Baxter Creek in the El Cerrito Hills, and from Strawberry Creek on the Berkeley campus. On Baxter Creek they sampled both a non-restored section and a section that had been "daylighted" a few years ago in Poinsett Park and restored by the Waterways Restoration Institute. The students used the U.S. EPA's Rapid Bioassessment Protocols to evaluate habitat conditions at all three sites, and the bugs they found in the streams to examine water quality.

Bugs are often sensitive to disturbances or low levels of pollution in streams that chemical and physical assessments do not always detect, and they have the advantage of being used world-wide as indicators. "Certainly in California they are becoming the main tool for assessing pollution," says Resh.

The results of Resh's work, soon-to-be-published in a journal article, indicate that both in-stream biological conditions and habitat values were better in the restored section of Baxter Creek than the non-restored section, but were slightly less rich than those of Strawberry Creek, which had been restored 12 years earlier. After measuring the number of bug families and species, and rating them using the Family Biotic Index (which assigns a pollution-tolerant value to each species), the researchers found that the non-restored section of Baxter contained more pollution-tolerant species than both the restored section and Strawberry Creek. Strawberry Creek and the restored section of Baxter both contained pollution-sensitive species like caddisflies that the non-restored creek did not.

"Post-project evaluation is often viewed as a luxury, as too expensive or time-consuming," says Resh. But this shows that it can be done easily and cheaply using volunteers, students, and neighborhood groups." The $4,000 cost, adds Resh, could have been reduced by 75% if university credit had been substituted for student salaries.

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