The watershed approach, currently used to assess regional streams in the United States, emphasizes least-disturbed reference conditions. Consideration of extensive wadable drainage systems found in Arkansas and Mississippi deltas challenges concepts of disturbance within a landscape of historic agricultural land use. Seventeen wadable drainage ditch sites in Arkansas and Mississippi deltas were...

ii Notice The material in this document has been subjected to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) technical review and has been approved for publication as an EPA document. The information contained herein is offered to the reader as a review of the " state of the science " concerning wetland bioassessment and nutrient enrichment and is not intended to be prescriptive guidance or firm ad...

Introduction Development of indicators of " ecosystem health " for Great Lakes coastal wetlands was recognized as a major need at the State-of-the-Lakes Ecosystem Conferences (SOLEC) held in Buffalo, New York in 1998 and Hamilton, Ontario in 2000. Indicators listed by the wetlands indicators task force at these conferences included indices of biotic integrity (IBI) based on macroinvertebrates, ...