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NHEERL on the Road
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
WED Ecologist To Teach Habitat and Biomonitoring Field Methods Short Course
Phil Kaufmann, an ecologist at the NHEERL Western Ecology Division's (WED's) Freshwater Ecology Branch, has been invited by the Federal University of Minas Gerais to teach a course in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, September 8-18, 2009. His course will involve training Brazilian university faculty and graduate students in the habitat and biomonitoring field methods used by EPA in the United States. Specifically, Dr. Kaufmann will conduct a three-part short course in the implementation and interpretation of these methods. In the first part of the course, he will give oral presentations on Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) approaches for sampling and analyzing physical habitat data, conducting regional assessments of ecological condition and associations between biota and habitat, evaluating reference condition, and assessing the relative roles of natural and anthropogenic factors that control aquatic habitat characteristics. Then, there will be direct, hands-on field demonstration and training in the EPA physical habitat methods. The final part of the course is a real-world application of these methods in a small regional assessment, in which Brazilian faculty and students will apply these field techniques under Dr. Kaufmann's supervision.
EPA will benefit from learning how Brazilian and other South American aquatic ecologists handle monitoring and assessment problems similar to those that face EPA in national surveys such as the recent National Wadeable Streams Assessment, the National Lakes Assessment, and the current National Rivers and Streams Assessment. Particularly important will be the information gained from the direct application of EMAP approaches to Brazilian waters and the acquisition of unpublished, state-of-the-art information concerning approaches for assessing habitat condition and evaluating fish assemblages in humid subtropical stream ecosystems, such as those in the southeastern United States, where the development of fish and habitat-based stream, river, and reservoirs have been challenging.