Excerpt
Agricultural drainage ditches are headwater streams that have been constructed or channelized for draining excess water from agricultural fields. The headwaters of many watersheds in the Midwestern United States consist mostly of ditches (Mattingly et al. 1993). Management of ditches focuses on water transport and ignores the potential impacts of these hydrological and geomorphological modifications on the water quality and aquatic biota. There is a need to identify methods of incorporating environmental considerations into ditch management. Conservation practices were traditionally used to manage soil and water resources to improve agricultural production but currently include methods intended to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture (Soil and Water Conservation Society 2001). However, there is a limited understanding of the ecology of ditches, and the ecological impacts of conservation practices on these modified lotic ecosystems have not been evaluated. Development of optimal management strategies for ditches will be hindered until a better understanding of the ecological processes operating within these ecosystems is achieved (Needelman et al. 2007). Understanding the relationships between fish communities and habitat factors within agricultural drainage ditches is a first step toward determining the potential impacts of conservation practices.
COLLABORATIVE ECOLOGY RESEARCH
In 2005, we initiated a…
Footnotes
Peter C. Smiley Jr. is a research ecologist in the Soil Drainage Research Unit, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Columbus, Ohio. Robert B. Gillespie is an associate professor in the Department of Biology, Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Kevin W. King is an agricultural engineer in the Soil Drainage Research Unit, USDA Agricultural Research Service. Chi-hua Huang is a soil scientist and research leader, National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory, USDA Agricultural Research Service, West Lafayette, Indiana.
- © 2008 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society