Aquatic Biomonitoring

Since 1990, Biomonitoring Program Director Dr. William O. McLarney and thousands of volunteers have been monitoring the Little Tennessee River basin. In those 25+ years, monitoring has occurred on more than 150 sites, generating the largest fish-based biomonitoring database in the world for any comparable sized watershed.

The Aquatic Biomonitoring season runs from late May until early August. Click here to learn more about volunteering with this program.

Biomonitoring sometimes uncovers potential problem areas, but Dr. McLarney also argues that “boring is good.” Read why here.

Biomonitoring Database

Data collected from our Biomonitoring Program is being housed at Coweeta‘s Long Term Ecological Research Program through the University of Georgia. Stream data since 1988 can be downloaded here.

Read Dr. Mclarney’s 2014 article about the history and future of the Aquatic Biomonitoring Program.

IBI Summaries of Aquatic Monitoring Seasons: (these typically take 1-2 years to update):

Click to download PDFs of summaries, and Excel spreadsheets of biomonitoring data.

*Hard copies of reports for years prior to 2001 can be found at our office.