Habitat Assessment of Non-Wadeable Rivers in Michigan

Habitat evaluation of wadeable streams based on accepted protocols provides a rapid and widely used adjunct to biological assessment. However, little effort has been devoted to habitat evaluation in non-wadeable rivers, where it is likely that protocols will differ and field logistics will be more challenging. We developed and tested a non-wadeable habitat index (NWHI) for rivers of Michigan, where non-wadeable rivers were defined as those of order ≥5, drainage area ≥1600 km², mainstem lengths ≥100 km, and mean annual discharge ≥15 m³/s. This identified 22 candidate rivers that ranged in length from 103 to 825 km and in drainage area from 1620 to 16,860 km². We measured 171 individual habitat variables over 2-km reaches at 35 locations on 14 rivers during 2000–2002, where mean wetted width was found to range from 32 to 185 m and mean thalweg depth from 0.8 to 8.3 m. We used correlation and principal components analysis to reduce the number of variables, and examined the spatial pattern of retained variables to exclude any that appeared to reflect spatial location rather than reach condition, resulting in 12 variables to be considered in the habitat index. The proposed NWHI included seven variables: riparian width, large woody debris, aquatic vegetation, bottom deposition, bank stability, thalweg substrate, and off-channel habitat. These variables were included because of their statistical association with independently derived measures of human disturbance in the riparian zone and the catchment, and because they are considered important in other habitat protocols or to the ecology of large rivers. Five variables were excluded because they were primarily related to river size rather than anthropogenic disturbance. This index correlated strongly with indices of disturbance based on the riparian (adjusted R² = 0.62) and the catchment (adjusted R² = 0.50), and distinguished the 35 river reaches into the categories of poor (2), fair (19), good (13), and excellent (1). Habitat variables retained in the NWHI differ from several used in wadeable streams, and place greater emphasis on known characteristic features of larger rivers.