Title: Ecological comparisons of thermally affected aquatic environments.
Abstract: ments are becoming commonplace in this country and throughout the world. The increased usage of nuclear power for the production of electricity insures that even greater demands will be placed on aquatic ecosystems used as recipients of excess heat. A critical need exists to un derstand how thermally affected environ ments function biologically.1 The U. S. Atomic Energy Commission's (aec) Savannah River plant near Aiken, S. C, provided an ideal situation for the examination of a variety of aquatic systems in regard to thermal waste disposal. Initial studies characterized the thermally affected systems in terms of their general ecology. The objective of the present study was to compare species composition and the relative abundance of certain components (vascular aquatic plants, fishes, and rep tiles ) of three reservoirs differently affected by thermal effluent from nuclear reactors.* One of the reservoirs received thermal effluent, another was recovering following former intense thermal loading, and the third area had had no direct elevation of water temperatures. The emphasis in this report is on some of the major, more ob vious, and non-migratory aquatic compo * As a result of continued field studies through out the year, several additional species of plants, fish, and reptiles have been reported from each of the study areas since preparation of the original manuscript. This is to be expected because much of the data were from collections during the sum mer period. The only possible change in the trends reported herein is that several fish species apparently enter Pond C from small streams dur ing reactor shutdown or during cooler parts of the year. Because Pond B is landlocked and Pond C is not, this may eventually result in more fish species occurring in the heated lake. nents of the ecosystems in question. This does not imply a low regard for the im portance of other components of the sys tem, such as algae, plankton, macro-inver tebrates, and amphibians. Work presently in progress on these and other facets will be reported at a later time. Study Area
Publication Year: 1973
Publication Date: 1973-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['pubmed']
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Cited By Count: 28
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