Michigan students use leaf packs to monitor water quality

Students from Sparta Middle School sift through leaf litter to search for macroinvertabrates that colonized the packs over the past month.

By Jamie Vaughn

Four weeks have passed and students in the Rogue River watershed are finishing up their leaf pack experiments with Trout Unlimited’s Home Rivers Initiative in Michigan.

Students from Cedar Springs High School and Sparta Middle School returned to their local trout streams with Trout Unlimited recently to retrieve the leaf packs they placed in the water earlier this autumn.

A total of 72 artificial leaf packs were collected and sorted through to find the macroinvertebrates that colonized them over the past month.

Trout Unlimited then joined the students in their lab to identify the insects and get a stream quality score. Based on the scores, which ranged from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’ the students made inferences about the effects of sedimentation, lack of riparian buffer and stormwater pollution on their local creeks.

The macroinvertebrate data from Nash and Cedar Creek will be uploaded to the Leaf Pack Network, where there is now data for four river systems in the Rogue River watershed, in addition to information from rivers across the country. This data will help inform Trout Unlimited for future restoration projects on these streams.

To date, the Home Rivers Initiative has worked with more than 550 students on the Leaf Pack Experiment.

The Rogue River Home Rivers Initiative Project is funded by the Frey Foundation, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, the Wege Foundation, the Wolverine World Wide Foundation, and the Schrems West Michigan Trout Unlimited.

Jamie Vaughn is Trout Unlimited's Rogue River Home Rivers Initiative coordinator.