Raccoon River Upstream of Des Moines

This site was analyzed using the BMIBI-Warm Water assessment methodology.

Sites that score between 0 - 30 are considered poor. Severely impaired macroinvertebrate community. Low numbers of taxa present, sensitive species not present, EPT taxa are rare or not present; community extremely unbalanced; dominated by a few pollution tolerant organisms; some trophic functional feeding groups are not represented. Total numbers of organisms may be low. Total taxa richness and EPT taxa richness are noticeably reduced from optimum levels; sensitive species and habitat specialists are rare; EPT taxa no longer dominate the macroinvertebrate community. Taxa that are tolerant of organic enrichment and/or excessive sediment loads are dominant; the community is unbalanced; a few generalist taxa make up a high percentage of the organisms present; collector-gatherers or collector-filterers are very dominant.

This location has been classified as a survey site. Survey sites are compared to reference sites within the same ecoregion. A reference site represents natural stream qualities that are least disturbed by human activities within the watershed. Reference sites are grouped by ecoregion to establish a benchmark against which these survey streams are compared.