Jordan Creek Monitoring

Starting when R. Weldon Larimore, Ph.D., first compiled a list of fish species and habitat conditions in Jordan Creek for his 1952 paper, “An inventory of the fishes of Jordan Creek,” Jordan Creek offers unique research opportunities.

Jordan Creek monitoring continued in 1978 under the supervision of Isaac Schlosser, Ph.D., who conducted a fish survey of the creek using the same electrofishing techniques developed by Larimore. Many other INHS scientists have also studied Jordan Creek, including Quentin Pickering, William Childers, Carl Heckrote, David Menzel, Charles Goldman, Michael Duever, John Peterka, David McGinty, David Andrews, Gary Camenisch, Paul Angermeier, and Martin Jennings, among others. These studies have created a well-developed database of historical fish and invertebrate populations, as well as water chemistry, which we will use for our current and future studies.

View a full list of Jordan Creek research.

To continue this data collection, we designed a long-term monitoring protocol for Jordan Creek in the summer of 2020. To this end, we are monitoring changes in stream water chemistry and temperature throughout the year. We will also sample the fish and invertebrate communities at 4 sites along Jordan Creek every other year as recipients of the Dr. R.W. Larimore Internship Award. Our protocol is based on the fish-collection methods described by Larimore et al. (1952) and on the habitat assessment and macroinvertebrate collection protocols used by the INHS. The information gathered from this monitoring program will be used to identify changes in fish populations over the past 70 years and provide information on the current fish and macroinvertebrate communities and stream habitat. The utility of the identified trends extends beyond Jordan Creek and provides insight for current and future research projects examining fish populations in nearby rivers and surrounding watersheds.