Monitoring Aquatic Health and Conditions of Rivers and Streams in the West

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages thousands of miles of perennial streams and rivers throughout the United States, is mandated to evaluate the effectiveness of decisions established in large-scale management plans, or Resource Management Plans. BLM contracted with ERG to provide support for monitoring the condition of and trends in river systems in Colorado and Arizona as part of BLM’s Aquatic Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) framework.

ERG has supported BLM’s Aquatic AIM Program since 2021, providing critical data to assess the health and condition of rivers, streams, and wetlands throughout Arizona and Colorado. Using AIM’s standardized field survey protocols, ERG has completed over 250 aquatic assessments across these two states. These assessments provide BLM with essential information for developing crucial decision-making policies, determining restoration treatment effectiveness, and assessing habitat conditions for aquatic and riparian species. ERG’s work has included collecting water quality and macroinvertebrate data, conducting geomorphology assessments, identifying riparian vegetation, and evaluating streambank stability and structure. Utilizing advanced GIS-based data collection tools such as Survey123 and ESRI FieldMaps, we provide high-quality, spatially accurate data that inform BLM’s land and water management decisions. In addition, we utilized the multi-metric index [JC1] (MMI) tool to collect biological and habitat data. This work enables BLM managers to conduct statistical, geospatial, and trend analysis to help determine the effectiveness of riparian restoration treatments, assess habitat conditions for species of concern, look at changes in stream condition over time, and ultimately decide if streams meet BLM health standards.  

 [JC1]It looks like this term is typically not upper-cased. Also, “multimetric” is apparently more common than “multi-metric” but either is fine.