Effects of Land Cover Disturbance on Stream Invertebrate Diversity and Metal Concentrations in a Small Urban Industrial Watershed
The landscape surrounding Sudbury, Ontario, has been severely affected by 100 years of mining and forestry and a recent, large-scale ecological risk assessment found that terrestrial plant communities continue to be impaired by remnant metals and poor soil conditions. We investigated the risks of these adverse landscape conditions on a small headwater stream by digitizing land cover at a fine scale and relating it to benthic invertebrate diversity and metal concentrations at 13 sites in the system.