Conservation In Practice - Capturing a River’s Memory

A publication of the Society for Conservation Biology

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Capturing a River’s Memory

ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK pinpoints land use changes in a watershed

By Nancy Bazilchuk
July-September 2005 (Vol. 6, No. 3)

When Patty Zaradic sees the spiny alien body of a mayfly nymph or the rough geometric tube of a caddisfly nymph, she sees more than an aquatic insect adapted to clear running water. In the patterns and assemblages of these macroinvertebrates, she sees a river’s memory.

“Aquatic insects are like camcorders,” says Zaradic, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stroud Water Research Center as part of The Nature Conservancy’s Smith Fellowship program. “The presence or absence of one of hundreds of possible species can tell us what happened to the stream for months or even a year prior to the sampling date.”

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