Session D3 - Physical and biological assessment of the Eel River Headwaters restoration sites in Plymouth, MA

The Eel River Headwaters Restoration Project (completed in August 2010) actively restored 40+ acres of commercial cranberry bogs into stream and wetland habitat. This study involved habitat, fish and macroinvertebrate assessments at 2 actively restored Eel River reaches, 2 passively restored cranberry bog reaches, and 2 reference reaches. Sampling occurred in September 2010 and June 2011 following standard protocols. Furthermore, at the 2 actively restored reaches, we compared 2 prior years of macroinvertebrate sample data to our post-restoration samples. For the post-restoration sampling, the cumulative percent of the variance explained for Principal Components Analysis (PCA) Axes 1 and 2 was 49.38%, 57.41%, and 36.14% for physical habitat, fish, and macroinvertebrates, respectively. In all 3 cases, our PCA results indicated spatial and temporal variability between reaches. Macroinvertebrate Family Biotic Index (FBI) of post restoration samples ranged from 3.83 to 8.12, indicating poor to excellent conditions. For 12 pairwise comparisons of macroinvertebrate data between pre-restoration and post-restoration communities, only 1 pair-wise comparison was significant (Mann-Whitney Rank Sum, p\u3c0.05). Results show the initial separation of the active Eel River restoration from the passive restoration and reference