Trask River Watershed Study: New food web studies of forest-stream interactions in a managed landscape

Forest management practices on federal, state and private lands in the Pacific Northwest, USA, have evolved over time in response to early research that documented impacts on water quality and fish. With new practices and differing BMPs across ownerships, new research is necessary to evaluate effectiveness.  The Trask River Watershed Study and affiliated studies in the Watershed Research Cooperative in Oregon are focusing on quantifying impacts of whole basin forest treatments on small, headwater streams and the extent to which these impacts are transmitted downstream. Through collaboration between researchers and managers at private forestry companies, state and federal agencies and universities, key individual, community and ecosystem processes have been identified and hypotheses generated that form the basis of our long-term observational and experimental studies in 14 headwater basins and four downstream cumulative effect sites. The studies extend from primary production, temperature, nutrients, detritus, across multiple trophic levels to population dynamics, community composition, ecosystem processes, stable isotope analyses and food web interactions. Our goals are to provide managers the tools and information for evaluating tradeoffs of differing management strategies as well as to improve our understanding of underlying mechanisms and spatially-explicit linkages responsible for modeled and observed changes in aquatic ecosystems.