Effects of wildfire on benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages in Southern California streams and implications for bioassessment monitoring programs

Wildfires are common in arid regions of southern California, sometimes burning as much as half a million acres in a season. These fires often cause dramatic impacts to the vegetation and soils of regional watersheds and, consequently, to the streams that drain them.

Water quality programs that monitor and regulate these systems have to account for the influence of these factors upon water quality measurements when making monitoring and regulatory decisions. This is true for traditional water quality measures (nutrients, metals, contaminants, etc.), but is especially important for integrative ecological condition indicators like bioassessment, the use of resident biological communities to infer water quality condition.