Ph. D. Utz - Field Guide to Rivers & Streams: Discovering Running Waters and Aquatic Life

Ryan Utz is an assistant professor of water resources at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and an outdoor enthusiast with an obsession for backcountry camping. He has published more than forty scientific articles on subjects ranging from Chinook Salmon restoration in California to long-term rising river salinity levels throughout North America. Less academic but more fun, a few of his outdoor forays into the wilderness have appeared in Backpacker magazine. Ryan earned an MS in wildlife and fisheries management from West Virginia University and a PhD in environmental science from the University of Maryland. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but spends the night in a tent every chance he can get.

I am most indebted to the excellent naturalist artists willing to share their photographic work in the following pages. Zach Alley, Andrea Kautz, Konrad Schmidt, Scott Smith, Ryan Douglas, Julia Wood, Brian Zimmerman, and others worked hard to create the invaluable images that help identify our precious native North American species. Online resources that some of these artists maintain, especially www.macroinvertebrates.org and https://ncfishes.com, provide excellent identification and natural history information, including for many rare species not covered here. I also thank Tim Pearce for the invitation to photograph bivalve mollusks from the outstanding malacology collection at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The brilliant Julia Barnes provided encouraging moral support and helpful feedback on writing.

Crandall, Keith A., and Jennifer E. Buhay. 2008. Global Diversity of Crayfish (Astacidae, Cambaridae, and ParastacidaeDecapoda) in Freshwater. In Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment, edited by E. V. Balian, C. Lvque, H. Segers, and K. Martens, 295301. Developments in Hydrobiology. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Lvque, C., T. Oberdorff, D. Paugy, M. L. J. Stiassny, and P. A. Tedesco. 2008. Global Diversity of Fish (Pisces) in Freshwater. In Freshwater Animal Diversity Assessment, edited by E. V. Balian, C. Lvque, H. Segers, and K. Martens, 54567. Developments in Hydrobiology. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Schlesinger, William H., and Scott Jasechko. 2014. Transpiration in the global water cycle. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 189190 (June): 11517.

Clow, David W. 2010. Changes in the timing of snowmelt and stream-flow in Colorado: a response to recent warming. Journal of Climate 23 (9): 22932306.

Eltahir, Elfatih A. B., and Rafael L. Bras. 1996. Precipitation recycling. Reviews of Geophysics 34 (3): 36778.

Hendriks, Martin R. 2010. Introduction to Physical Hydrology. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Holland, G., B. Sherwood Lollar, L. Li, G. Lacrampe-Couloume, G. F. Slater, and C. J. Ballentine. 2013. Deep fracture fluids isolated in the crust since the Precambrian era. Nature 497 (7449): 35760.

Naman, Sean M., Jordan S. Rosenfeld, and John S. Richardson. 2016. Causes and consequences of invertebrate drift in running waters: from individuals to populations and trophic fluxes. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 73 (8): 12921305.

Joshi, Sanjeev, and Y. Jun Xu. 2017. Bedload and suspended load transport in the 140-km reach downstream of the Mississippi River avulsion to the Atchafalaya River. Water 9 (9): 716.

McKergow, Lucy A., David M. Weaver, Ian P. Prosser, Rodger B. Grayson, and Adrian E. G. Reed. 2003. Before and after riparian management: sediment and nutrient exports from a small agricultural catchment, Western Australia. Journal of Hydrology 270 (3): 25372.

Mossa, Joann. 1996. Sediment dynamics in the lowermost Mississippi River. Engineering Geology 45 (1): 45779.

Baxter, Colden V., Kurt D. Fausch, Masashi Murakami, and Phillip L. Chapman. 2004. Fish invasion restructures stream and forest food webs by interrupting reciprocal prey subsidies. Ecology 85 (10): 265663.

Beacham, Terry D., Clyde B. Murray, and Ruth E. Withler. 1989. Age, morphology, and biochemical genetic variation of Yukon River Chinook Salmon. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 118 (1): 4663.

Bevis, Michael, Douglas Alsdorf, Eric Kendrick, Luiz Paulo Fortes, Bruce Forsberg, Robert Smalley, and Janet Becker. 2005. Seasonal fluctuations in the mass of the Amazon River system and Earths elastic response. Geophysical Research Letters 32 (16).

Dias de Paiva, Rodrigo Cauduro, Diogo Costa Buarque, Walter Collischonn, Marie-Paule Bonnet, Frdric Frappart, Stephane Calmant, and Carlos Andr Bulhes Mendes. 2013. Large-scale hydrologic and hydrodynamic modeling of the Amazon River basin. Water Resources Research 49 (3): 122643.

Fukui, Dai, Masashi Murakami, Shigeru Nakano, and Toshiki Aoi. 2006. Effect of emergent aquatic insects on bat foraging in a riparian forest. Journal of Animal Ecology 75 (6): 125258.

Helfield, James M., and Robert J. Naiman. 2001. Effects of salmon-derived nitrogen on riparian forest growth and implications for stream productivity. Ecology 82 (9): 24039.

Jenkins, Robert E., and Noel M. Burkhead. 1993. Freshwater Fishes of Virginia. American Fisheries Society.

Kubitzki, Klaus, and Albrecht Ziburski. 1994. Seed dispersal in flood plain forests of Amazonia. Biotropica 26 (1): 3043.

Minshall, G. Wayne, Robert C. Petersen, and Curtis F. Nimz. 1985. Species richness in streams of different size from the same drainage basin. The American Naturalist 125 (1): 1638.

Mulholland, Patrick J., Robert O. Hall, Daniel J. Sobota, Walter K. Dodds, Stuart E. G. Findlay, Nancy B. Grimm, Stephen K. Hamilton, et al. 2009. Nitrate removal in stream ecosystems measured by 15N addition experiments: denitrification. Limnology and Oceanography 54 (3): 66680.

Murakami, Masashi, and Shigeru Nakano. 2002. Indirect effect of aquatic insect emergence on a terrestrial insect population through by birds predation. Ecology Letters 5 (3): 33337.

Oberdorff, Thierry, Eric Guilbert, and Jean-Claude Lucchetta. 1993. Patterns of fish species richness in the Seine River basin, France. Hydro-biologia 259 (3): 15767.

Vannote, Robin L., G. Wayne Minshall, Kenneth W. Cummins, James R. Sedell, and Colbert E. Cushing. 1980. The river continuum concept. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 37 (1): 13037.

Wollheim, W. M., C. J. Vrsmarty, B. J. Peterson, S. P. Seitzinger, and C. S. Hopkinson. 2006. Relationship between river size and nutrient removal. Geophysical Research Letters 33 (6).

Clausnitzer, Viola, Vincent J. Kalkman, Mala Ram, Ben Collen, Jonathan E. M. Baillie, Matja Bedjani, William R. T. Darwall, et al. 2009. Odonata enter the biodiversity crisis debate: the first global assessment of an insect group. Biological Conservation 142 (8): 186469.

Twardochleb, Laura, Ethan Hiltner, Matthew Pyne, and Phoebe Zarnetske. 2021. Freshwater insects CONUS: a database of freshwater insect occurrences and traits for the contiguous United States. Global Ecology and Biogeography 30 (4): 82641.

Etnier, David, and Wayne Starnes. 1993. The Fishes of Tennessee. New-found Press, 1993.

NatureServe. 2010. Digital distribution maps of the freshwater fishes in the conterminous United States. Version 3.0. Arlington, VA.

Schramm, Harold L., Jay T. Hatch, Robert A. Hrabik, and William T. Slack. 2016. Fishes of the Mississippi River. American Fisheries Society Symposium 84: 5377.