Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Alaska
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The goal of this project is to use aquatic insects as bioindicators of environmental health downstream of El Vado Dam on the Rio Chama in northern New Mexico. Working collaboratively with an NGO, New Mexico Wild, and a team of citizen science river runners, we deployed light traps for three summers to collect adult aquatic insects as they emerged from the river. We will use these data to explore how planned dam maintenance by the Bureau of Reclamation on El Vado Dam in 2021 affects the ecological community downstream.