The objectives of this project were to examine the potential application of certain bioassessment protocols and to develop biological criteria for New Jersey lakes. Besides the development of a multi-metric index, task performed in this project included the indentification and enumeration of benthic macroinvertebrates and diatom assemblages collected from the sublittoral zone of 72 New Jersey Lakes: grain size analysis of sediment samples form the 72 lakes; classification of the lakes using statistical procedures (non-metric multidimensional scaling, rank correlation, and analysis of variance). Six core metrics from a list of 12 candidate metrics were selected to be used in the muti-metric index based on analysis of variance and box whisker plots.
Back to Project Experience