Coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii) and cottids (Cottus spp) commonly co-occur in headwater streams in western Oregon. Little is known about the comparative trophic ecology of these species or how they respond to seasonal scarcity of resources. In this study I evaluated the seasonal variability in diets and consumption as it related to food limitation for coastal cutthroat trout and cottids. Over 340 individual diets were quantified from seasonal samples collected in May, July and September of 2008. Diet overlap was relatively low among seasons and species. Coastal cutthroat trout exhibited a more diverse diet in terms of taxonomic richness of prey and consumed both aquatic and terrestrially-derived prey, whereas cottids appeared to specialize on aquatic prey. Based on diet composition and amount consumed, all species appeared to be increasingly food limited from July to September, relative to May. However when diet composition was integrated with a bioenergetic model, coastal cutthroat trout were found to be substantially more food limited than cottids. Differences in the cost of activity between these species may explain this result. Activity costs may be higher for trout, which reside in the water column and rely on active swimming, versus cottids, which lack a swim bladder and are more benthic oriented. Results of this work suggest that cottids are dietary specialists, feeding almost exclusively on benthic prey.

The Trask Watershed Study is a multi-disciplinary, long-term research project in the Oregon Coast Range that is designed to examine the effects of current forest management practices on aquatic ecosystems. Extensive physical (e.g., water quantity and quality, channel morphology) and biological data (e.g., primary productivity, macro-invertebrate communities, amphibian movement and fish populations and behavior) has been collected in both the small and large watersheds since 2006 and will continue until 2016. One of these key parameters we have been collecting at multiple scales is stream temperature.
Understanding the variability in stream temperature patterns and processes prior to harvest in both small non-fish headwater streams and downstream in larger fish-bearing basins allows us to anticipate potential responses to harvest and subsequent potential changes in biota. Using the pre-harvest stream temperature data we examine variability in maximum and minimum temperatures across the 15 small headwater streams. We also examine how well both small treatment streams and the larger downstream basins correlate to un-harvested reference streams to determine the best match to compare post-harvest response. Finally we examine how stream temperature patterns vary longitudinally in the downstream direction through time.

Management strategies along headwater streams typically focus on aquatic resources, but riparian forests also are habitat for many terrestrial wildlife species. Increasing the understanding of mechanisms that underlie the riparian associations of these species can help integrate management of aquatic and terrestrial environments in headwater forests. We investigated the diets of and food availability for four bird species associated with riparian habitats in the headwaters of the Trask River, in northwestern Oregon. We tested the hypotheses that 1) emergent aquatic insects were a food source for insectivorous birds in headwater riparian areas, and 2) the abundance of arthropod prey did not differ between streamside and upland areas during the bird breeding season. We found that adult aquatic insects represented a relatively small proportion of available prey abundance and biomass and were present in less than 1% of the diet samples from the four riparian-associated bird species. Nonetheless, arthropod prey, comprised primarily of insects of terrestrial origin, was more abundant in streamside than upland samples. We concluded that food resources for birds in headwater riparian areas are primarily associated with terrestrial vegetation, and that bird distributions along the gradient from streamside to upland may be related to variation in arthropod prey availability.

This dissertation is a collection of three manuscripts that serve to fill the knowledge gaps and advance methods of detecting the effects of contemporary forest harvesting in experimental catchment studies. The objective of this research was to develop change detection models using time-series records to detect and quantify the effects of forest harvesting on streamflow and sediment yield. To accomplish this, it was necessary to characterize streamflow and sediment processes at a temporal scale capable of describing daily, monthly, and seasonal dynamics following forest harvesting; increase sample sizes used to construct regression-based change detection models; and develop alternative methods to the paired-catchment approach in order to discern changes in streamflow and sediment using highly variable time-series data. The paired-catchment approach was used to detect and quantify relative changes in streamflow and sediment yield in 5 harvested catchments. The ability to detect statistically significant changes at certain time-steps was a function of accounting for all sources of variability in change detection models. In this study, we aimed to develop robust change detection models using time-series data to increase sample size and decrease false/missed detections of true treatment effects.