Jordan Creek is a small stream in Illinois that offers unique research opportunities because of how extensively it has been studied since the 1950s. Starting when Dr. R. Weldon Larimore 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 monitoring was continued by Dr. Isaac Schlosser in 1978 when he conducted a fish survey of Jordan Creek using the same electrofishing techniques developed by Dr. Larimore. In addition to Larimore and Schlosser 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 that we will be using for our current and future studies.
For a list of Jordan Creek research, please click HERE.
To continue this data collection, we designed a long-term monitoring protocol for Jordan Creek in the summer of 2020. For this, we are monitoring changes in stream water chemistry and temperature throughout the year. We will also sample the fish and invertebrate community at 4 sites along Jordan Creek every other year with the recipient of the Dr. R.W. Larimore Internship Award. Our protocol is based on the fish-collection methods of Larimore et al.’s 1952 paper and 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 identified trends can extend beyond Jordan Creek and provide insight for current and future research projects looking at fish populations in nearby rivers and surrounding watersheds.
