Research Areas > Contaminants > Sediment Quality Assessment > Benthic Assessment Methods
Project Group: Benthic Assessment Methods
SCCWRP Research
Benthic (bottom-dwelling) invertebrates are often used to assess sediment quality because they live in sediments and adapt to site-specific conditions. They integrate the biological effects of multiple co-occurring contaminants and multiple stressors over time. Interpreting impacts to benthic infaunal assemblages is challenging because of the biological community complexity: hundreds of species and thousands of individuals are often found in one square meter of sediment. As an interpretive tool, benthic indices remove this complexity by converting the complex biological information to a single number that ranks sites on a scale from “good” to “bad”. This value is easily communicated to environmental managers and the public. Benthic index values can also be used by managers to prioritize impacted sites, track trends over time, or correlate benthic biological responses with data about stressors, such as chemical contaminant concentrations.
Sediment samples are collected offshore and sifted to separate benthic invertebrates from sediments for identification and enumeration.
Projects involving benthic assessment methods include:
This page was last updated on: 8/23/2010