Technical Bulletin No. 0868: Long-Term Receiving Water Study Data Compendium: September 2000 to August 2001

The NCASI Long-Term Receiving Water Study (LTRWS), begun in 1998, is a 10- to 20-year project involving four different U.S. receiving waters: Codorus Creek in Pennsylvania; the Leaf River in Mississippi; the McKenzie River in Oregon; and the Willamette River in Oregon. The LTRWS objectives are to evaluate possible differences in the aquatic community upstream/downstream of representative point source effluent discharges from pulp and paper mills. The experimental design includes multiple sampling sites and variables for each of the receiving waters in the study. The measured components include water and effluent chemistry, characterization of the effluents with chronic bioassays, river temperature and flow, solar radiation, and detailed measurements of the periphyton, benthic macroinvertebrates and fish communities. This report is the third annual overview of the monitoring study, covering the period from September 2000 to August 2001. The monitoring at Codorus Creek during this period included four sampling dates at eight sampling sites for biotic community data, 11 sampling dates at six sites for water quality data, and two sampling dates for mill effluent. Among the aquatic community findings for Codorus Creek were four divisions of periphyton, 210 macroinvertebrate taxa (an increase of 11% over the previous year), and 41 fish taxa (a 14% increase over the previous year). This was the first full year of monitoring for the Leaf River, with two sampling dates at six sampling sites for biotic community data, 11 sampling dates along six sites for water quality data, and nine sampling dates for mill effluent.