Written by: Chelsea Gray
How do you tell the health of a river? This is a question that scientist all over the world struggle to answer. A common method for determining stream health is the Stream Bioassessment.
What is a “Stream Bioassment”?
Because you can’t ask a stream how it’s feeling, we use indirect measures of health for an ecosystem. One way we do this for a stream is by identifying what types of organisms live there. In particular, we look at benthic macro-invertebrates, or the bugs that live in the stream bed.