WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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Okay, so we're at the Minam River in northeastern
Oregon today sampling this site as part of NAQWA's

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benchmark reference stream network.
Just a little bit upstream from the town of Wallowa.

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What you see is this beautiful creek here. My piece in this is to look at the algal community,

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all the different types of algae that grow
on the rocks that tell us about water quality,

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tells us about how productive the stream is.
Also gives information about

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the amount and type of algae that's available to
benthic invertebrates and other bugs that

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go on to feed the fish. So this is really
where this river's foodweb starts.

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So you can see on some of the rocks here there's some green algae, lettuce-like type of green algae

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called prasiola. Its common name is "arctic
algae." As the name implies it does very well

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in cold water temperatures. Many of the rocks
have the prasiola arctic algae just on the surface.

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And you can see in some places its actually out of the water and much more abundant

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when the flows were higher and the temperatures
were cooler earlier in the season. And typically,

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this algae doesn't require a lot of nutrients.
It's a high quality type of algae that is

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indicative of low nutrient concentrations
and very good water quality. And you can see

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in here there's a bunch of Simuliidae black
fly larvae in and amongst the mat here. But

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this is just one type of algae that we have in
the Minam River here.