Long-term Trends in Ecosystem Health

The goal of this report is to assess trends in benthic macroinvertebrate community structure in the Peace-Athabasca river system. The report describes a database compiled from such sources as the provincial environmental ministry and pulp and paper companies, reviews the quality of the data and the sampling methods and protocols used in collecting the macroinvertebrate community data, and presents results of multivariate statistical analyses and cluster analyses of the data. The results include the degree of temporal changes in macroinvertebrate communities upstream and downstream of point-source outfalls.