Water Stewardship Information Sources
| Citation | Perrin, CJ and Bennett, S. 2010. Quality of streams in the Upper Skagit River watershed using the reference condition approach. Prepared for Sakgit Environmental Endowment Commission. |
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| Organization | Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission |
| URL | http://skagiteec.org/skagit-research-library/sp-files/limnotek-water-quality-final-report-feb2010 |
| Abstract/Description or Keywords | The reference condition approach (RCA) was used to describe baseline water quality in streams of the 1,054 km2 Skagit River watershed north of the Canada/USA border. Reference condition describes a suite of biological and habitat attributes found at sites having little or no exposure to stressors caused by land use and other human activities. The premise behind the RCA is to sample a large number of sites in reference condition and use relationships between biological and environmental descriptors to build a predictive model that allows comparison of a test site with a reference condition. The Skagit model was called the Beast Assessment of Skagit Streams (BASS) in which “Beast” is an acronym for “Benthic Assessment of Sediment”, a type of RCA model that has been developed in Canada as a national bioassessment protocol. The bioassessment procedures are explained on the website called CABIN (Hhttp://cabin.cciw.ca/application/welcome.asp?Lang=en-caH ). The project provides the Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission (SEEC) with an overview of present water quality in the Canadian portion of the Skagit watershed and a framework for monitoring potential development and natural changes to water quality in future years. A total of 49 reference sites were sampled throughout the Skagit watershed in late August of 2007 and 2008, resulting in a sample density of 22 km2 /sample, which is among the most dense sample layouts in regional scale RCA programs worldwide. Ten additional sites were sampled downstream of the Sunshine Valley Resort, the Giant Copper mineral exploration site on Silverdaisy Mountain, near highway drainage, or near unstable roads and range lands where cattle grazing was occurring. These “test” sites were potentially disturbed and were excluded from reference condition modeling. Assemblages of benthic invertebrates were sampled because they are good indicators of water quality. Accompanying environmental data was measured in the field or derived from GIS data layers. It included geomorphic variables, forest and riparian cover, physical habitat attributes, land use variables, water temperature, and concentrations of nutrients, basic chemical analytes, and metals in water. The benthic invertebrates were sampled using kick net procedures and family level enumerations were used in the RCA modeling. |
| Information Type | report |
| Regional Watershed | Lower Fraser |
| Sub-watershed if known | Skagit River |
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| Project status | complete |
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