Upper Missouri River EMAP
(Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program-Surface Waters)
Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes, Northeastern Montana

DESCRIPTION AND SCOPE OF WORK:
This project has been funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The program focuses on evaluating ecological conditions on regional and national scales. The procedures used were presented in the EMAP field operations and methods for measuring the ecological condition of non-wadeable rivers and streams manual. Projects for this manual were collaborated under the sponsorship of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and EMAP.

In the past 4 years the Fort Peck Tribes’ team was responsible for monitoring and assessing 256 river miles of the upper Missouri River Reach on the Missouri River. In these years they sampled 36 open-water sites, which involved water chemistry, macroinvertebrates, flow and habitat assessments. Shoreline totals were 51 sites, these involved water chemistry, macroinvertebrates, bank measurements, canopy cover, and habitat assessments. The backwaters, which were less favorable because of the painstaking walking through brush to find the sites and over half the time they were dry backwaters, totaled 21. These involved walking sometimes miles to find the sites, doing water chemistry, macroinvertebrates, canopy cover and habitat assessments.

OBJECTIVES, TASKS, ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
The first year on the river was the hardest because they were just getting started and no one on the boat really understood how to read the river. They would often be stuck on several sandbars a day because of this, but as time went by they really became one with the river and the sandbar episodes became few and far in between. This year the focus has been on completing a percentage of the backwaters from the past two years and establishing reference sites along the reach.

This is a success story because the Tribe has overcome many obstacles in order to monitor the Missouri River for future references and future monitoring. Because so much goes into the Missouri River the information that they have obtained over the years will be very useful in protecting this big waterway for the future.

The photo to the right shows one of the technicians who has been on this project from the beginning doing some of the field work. The day looks beautiful in the picture but some of the days could be anywhere from 119º - 40ºF, with rain or snow—yes, snow!

They were on the river in October and November. Overcoming many obstacles, the crew really stayed together to finish a job well done.

The photo on the left shows the intern and technician doing bank canopy measurements and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. This is a mild bank-- some of the banks were very steep and the water very deep, but safety was always the first issue and only mild bug bites or scratches were accounted for in the years of the Upper Missouri River-EMAP sampling.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Sandra White Eagle & Laurie Schafer, OEP Division of Water Quality