Streams/home

About the Streams Project
Beginning in 2008, Vermont EPSCoR together with a large number of collaborating high school teams has collected water quality and macroinvertebrate community data on a number of small streams in Vermont, New York, and Puerto Rico. The project gathers valuable research quality data while also training a new generation of scientists. Please visit the project home page for more information.

WikiEducator component
Starting in 2012, the macroinvertebrate identification tools previously hosted on a static web site are being moved to WikiEducator. Our intention is to make the components available in a reusable format that will facilitate flexible use by educators.

Macroinvertebrate templates
The templates describe macroinvertebrate families and genera that have been identified from stream samples. Each template includes a written description of characteristics useful for identification and a photograph. In many cases there are links to photographs of particular anatomical features designed to facilitate identification.

Our first use of these templates has been to assemble them on web pages and now wikis tailored to specific streams being sampled for research and educational purposes. Our intent is to lower the sometimes formidable barriers to macroinvertebrate identification by presenting the most common invertebrates from a given stream on a single page.

The templates could also be assembled in other ways. Teachers, scientists, and wiki collaborators are welcome to assemble them by taxonomic group, pollution tolerance, or in any other way that may fit a purpose we have not imagined.

River sites
We are working on new river pages to facilitate macroinvertebrate identification at the sites in current use by our collaborating teachers and students. We have established a fairly simple format including basic location information of specific sampling locations. Collaborators are more than welcome to add additional rivers

Rivers completed
List of completed streams