​This year’s Society for Freshwater Science (SFS) Annual Meeting took place 4–9 June 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the Raleigh Convention Center.
 
The SFS Annual Meeting is a major meeting of scientific professionals and a great review of the current work being done. This conference includes events such as poster sessions, formal research presentations, lectures, luncheons, and mixers. It is a place to meet other scientists from related fields of study such as ecology, entomology, and biology.  This year’s theme was, “Designing Our Freshwater Future”. The primary discussion at the conference was focused on sustainable water supply, and what we as scientists can do to help prevent depletion and pollution of freshwaters.

At this event, I presented a poster on our project, titled Learning to See, Seeing to Learn. Our poster aligned well with the theme of the meeting. If more citizen scientists become involved with water quality monitoring, and thus are able to alert professionals when there is a pollution problem, it will help prevent further pollution of our water in the future and aid in the fight for sustainable water.

People were very excited about our project. They really like that it is going to be open resource. I had several people tell me that they had already visited our website, liked what they saw, and are interested to see how it grows. I think that this project is going to help “smooth the learning curve” for a lot of citizen scientists and people new to macroinvertebrate identification.

People liked the gigapixel images, especially with the characters pinned on them. They are also excited to see the glossary and are eager to use it when it is fully developed. I had several people ask if it would be possible to compare two different taxa on the same page. I told them that currently we cannot, but that we are still making changes to the website, so it may be possible in the future. People we excited about how many different layers of information were simplified and packed into one tool.

We won the award for Best Poster Presentation in Applied Research. I will be given free registration for next year’s SFS meeting in Michigan. And, if we decide to publish a paper based on our poster in Freshwater Science, page charges will be waived.
​
Overall this was a great meeting. It was a great learning and networking opportunity for me, and I enjoyed spreading the enthusiasm about our project. I’m looking forward to next year’s meeting.

by Morgan Summerlin, an undergraduate art student at Clemson University, and NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) fellow

For the macroinvertebrates.org project, I have been creating order-level arthropod illustrations. A few months and several illustrations later, I have developed a great respect for the knowledge of entomologists and scientific illustrators. I have learned a great deal about how to use Adobe programs, standard formatting for professional illustrations, and even insect taxonomy and identification. Most importantly, I have learned to view specimens with a precise eye, because no detail is too tiny to omit in an illustration!  

Below are some examples of my most recent work.

By Dr. John Morse, Clemson University

The number of freshwater macroinvertebrate taxa occurring in eastern North America is much greater than the number imaged and annotated in this project.
​How were the project’s taxa chosen?

1. The families and genera for which we provide images and annotations are relatively common and occur throughout most or all of eastern North America—less-common taxa and taxa with more-restricted ranges are not included. The number of taxa for which we provide images and the smaller number of taxa for which we provide annotations are also limited by the resources available for the project.
2. We include only freshwater macroinvertebrate taxa encountered in eastern North America that are commonly used for estimating an Index of Biological (or Biotic) Integrity (IBI). As noted in the US EPA's guiding reference (Barbour et al. 1999), IBIs typically include insects, crustaceans, snails, bivalves, annelids, mites, and a few other macroinvertebrates that are rarely seen. We concentrate on insects, but, for completeness, we also include some examples of non-insect macroinvertebrates. The reason for restricting the list of non-insect macroinvertebrates is that a longer list often will require imagery and annotation for structures that are visible only with dissection and special preparation (e.g., special stains, mounting on microscope slides, etc.), activities that citizen stream-watch participants are not likely to attempt.
3. Many interesting macroinvertebrate taxa occur in lakes, ponds, swamps, etc., with most of these taxa occurring exclusively in such habitats. However, there are no standard protocols for using macroinvertebrates to assess water quality in lentic (still-water) habitats. The above-mentioned EPA reference pertains only to "streams and wadeable rivers," generally smaller lotic (flowing water) habitats. This means that both professional biologists and citizen stream-watch groups currently focus their freshwater biomonitoring efforts on flowing surface water. Therefore, freshwater taxa that occur only in lentic habitats are not included in this project.

Why are annotations provided sometimes for a genus, sometimes for less-refined levels of taxonomy such as a family or an order? What criteria were used to decide the amount of detail provided in the annotations?

At a minimum, the level of annotation provided for each taxon is the level needed to distinguish it from other taxa imaged in this project. At the level of order and family, our annotations will often distinguish the taxon from all other North American taxa, but for families with multiple genera we did not attempt to annotate genera sufficiently to distinguish them from other North American genera that are not imaged.

Reference cited:
Barbour, M.T., J Gerritsen, B.D. Snyder, & J.B. Stribling. 1999. Rapid Bioassessment Protocols for Use in Streams and Wadeable Rivers: Periphyton, Benthic Macroinvertebrates, and Fish. Second Edition. EPA 841-B-99-002. U.S. Environmental Protectin Agency, Office of Water, Washington, D.C.
*Available from https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi/20004OQK.PDF?Dockey=20004OQK.PDF