The Math Of Coffee And Clogging
Dancing is hard, especially if you have trouble with counting past four. Bill Lynch continues to explore clogging in this next installment of "Lore."
Continue Reading Take Me to More NewsMountaintop removal mining does have an effect on fish populations downstream from the mining operations, according to a study just released by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The study title is a mouthful: Temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of fish assemblages downstream from mountaintop mining, which is the fancy way of saying USGS scientists looked at how well fish populations are doing in streams down river from mountaintop mining sites.
The co-authors are Doug Chambers, a biologist and water quality specialist in Charleston, West Virginia, and Than Hitt, a fish researcher at the Leetown Science Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia.
The study looked at changes with respect to:
“And by looking at how those things change over time we can get some clues about what’s really happening in the system,” Hitt said.
Over a two year period of time, in 2010 and 2011, Chambers and Hitt collected samples from the Guyandotte River Basin in southern West Virginia. Streams that were studied include the Upper Mudd River, the Left Fork of the Mudd, Big Ugly Creek and Laurel Creek. All these streams are down river from mining sites. They were able to compare their samples to data collected in 1999 and 2001 for a water quality study done by Penn State University researchers.
Some study results:
And Chambers said the results can help policy makers as they decide how to regulate the state’s water resources.
“West Virginia right now is blessed with abundant water,” he said. “If we’re going to continue to have readily available abundant water we need to understand the processes that affect its quality very broadly.”
Both scientists said the study also provides a framework for future research- both in the field and in a lab setting.