Sturgeon River Watershed Aquatic Ecosystem Assessment

The North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance (NSWA) is responsible for making watershed management recommendations to local watershed partners and the Government of Alberta. The Sturgeon River (SR) is one of the 12 sub-watersheds within the larger North Saskatchewan River (NSR) watershed. Although the SR watershed covers a relatively large portion of the NSR watershed, comprehensive information regarding the aquatic ecosystem is not available. Thus, the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance (NSWA) commissioned CPP Environmental to conduct this survey to create a baseline and status regarding the aquatic ecosystems along the SR. The scope of this project included multiple ecosystem components, including water quality, physical habitat, macroinvertebrate community, and fish community. The purpose of measuring all of these components is to obtain a comprehensive view of the SR aquatic ecosystems, which each are communities of living organisms and their physical and chemical environment. The Sturgeon River (SR) was surveyed at twelve sampling stations distributed throughout the length of the river, as well as the main tributaries. At each sampling station on the SR, physical habitat, water quality, vegetation, fish, and macroinvertebrate surveys took place. In the tributaries, only water quality was measured. Water quality variables analyzed included nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen), dissolved oxygen, suspended solids, pesticides, metals, and salts.

Citation

Charette Pell Poscente (CPP) Environmmental. 2021-03-19. "Sturgeon River Watershed Aquatic Ecosystem Assessment" (dataset). 1.0.0. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/pefk-dj94.

Data Collection Information

The Sturgeon River was surveyed at twelve stations distributed throughout the length of the river. These locations were pre-determined based on location relative to important features such as lakes and urban areas, as well as historical hydrometric measurement locations. At each station, 3 transects were established 50 m apart to allow the characterization of habitat and vegetation along a 150 m reach. Water quality, vegetation, fish, and macroinvertebrate surveys took place within each river reach. Fish sampling locations varied somewhat due to access limitations with respect to the electrofishing boat. With the exception of M10, all stations were accessed at bridge crossings and transects were placed 100 m upstream of crossings and any other barriers such as fords or beaver dams. Station M10 was placed downstream of the road because conditions upstream were not suitable. Habitat assessments occurred during low flows from August 29th to September 20th, 2017. Metrics and procedures followed the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute’s Alberta-based stream field protocols (ABMI 2007) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s procedures for low gradient streams (Barbour et al. 1999). Water quality samples were taken at each station on a monthly basis from February 2017 to September 2017. Water sampling consisted of two methods; 1) a water probe (YSI Multi-Probe) measurement and; 2) a water sample sent to MAXXAM lab.

Attribution Licence (ODC-By) v1.0

You are free to share, copy, distribute, use, modify, transform, build upon, and produce works from the data as long as you attribute any public use of the data, or works produced from the data, in the manner specified in the licence. For any use or redistribution of the data, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the licence of the data and keep intact any notices on the original data. https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/

API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/pefk-dj94'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

Changelog