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KS eTriny
; STUDY

Environmental Protection
Agency

The Fort Peck Tribes Use Biological Criteria |
Their Water Quality Standards*

Fort Peck Tribes used biological
assessments to identify degraded water-

bodies on the reservation. Damage to
streambanks (such as erosion and loss of vege-
tation) resulting from heavy livestock grazing is
a common cause of degradation to reservation
waters. The Tribes have obtained federal grants
to restore the streams. Integrating biological cri-
teria into their water quality standards program
helps the Tribes detect problems in reservation
waters that other regulatory approaches cannot
always find. For example, a type of fish may
disappear because erosion has destroyed its
spawning sites, Chemical criteria would not
identify this, but an assessment of the plants
and animals living in the stream could reveal
Biological criteria allow a tribe to set goals for
waterbodies based on the types and numbers of
aquatic species that should be present in the

Why use biological information and

biological criteria?

More than 25 years after it was passed, the Clean
Water Act still challenges us to answer critical
questions about the physical, chemical, and biologi-
cal state of our waters, One of the most meaningful
ways of answering these questions is to observe the
plants and animals that live in bodies of water. The
number and types of aquatic plants and animals are
affected by both pollution and loss of habitat, They
can reveal problems that might otherwise be missed
or underestimated using chemical water quality
criteria. Biological criteria are narrative or numeric
standards that describe the biological community
that should live in a waterbody. Biological data are
the core for setting protection or restoration goals,
for determining what to watch and how to under-
stand what is found, for ranking which problem
areas get worked on first, and for judging the effec-
tiveness of management actions.

waterbodies, Establishing biological criteria as part of their water quality standards will allow the Fort
Peck Tribes to use federal programs, both regulatory and non-regulatory, to meet their water quality goals.

Tribal Background and Operations

The Fort Peck Reservation and trust lands,
located in northeastern Montana, are
home to the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes.
Within the 2-million-acre reservation lie
seven major watershed drainages, all of them

tributaries to the Missouri River. Land use within

the Fort Peck Tribes reservation is primarily
agricultural; 55 percent rangeland, 43 percent

cropland, and 2 percent forestland, plus low-density
urban area and roads, Agricultural practices cause
98 percent of the problems in the Tribes’ streams.

Fort Peck Reservation

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the Tribes’ water quality standards in 2000.

‘The Tribes’ Office of Environmental Protection introduced the concept of including biological
criteria in the Tribes’ water quality management strategy. Incorporating biological criteria into their water
quality standards complemented the chemical and physical criteria the Tribes had been using.

aE

*? * Environmental terns used in this case study are defined in the enclosed glossary,



o— °

In 1991, the Tribes began collecting data on macroinvertebrates (e.g., crayfish, clams, insects) and
fish communities at 16 sites on streams across the reservation, They used this biological communi-
ty data to develop numeric biological criteria for the tribal streams based on the type of organisms
living there and their habits, Using the macroinvertebrate data, the Office of Environmental
Protection developed a scoring system (the Biological Condition Rating) to assess a stream.

Successful Application

By using biological information, the Fort Peck Tribes Office of Environmental Protection identi-
fied and addressed specific environmental problems within the reservation. By using the Biological
Condition Rating system, they have been able to determine what stream segments on the reserva-
tion are most degraded and therefore, require immediate attention. They can use information col-
lected through the Biological Condition Rating system in funding requests to federal agencies to
document specific problems.

The Tribes have used a $350,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the
Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and a $168,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency through the Nonpoint Source Program to build sources of water away from
streambanks, install a pipeline, and establish cross-fencing to improve riparian habitat along the
stream. The biological assessment program is sampling and analyzing aquatic organisms at the
sites where the improvements were made to see if the Biological Condition Rating is detecting a
change in the environment.

Monitoring chemical and physical parameters alone may not be enough to document water
quality problems. For example, one station downstream from an area where grazing cattle were
eroding streambanks recorded chemical data within normal ranges. However, the Biological
Condition Rating system showed impacts to aquatic organisms, indicating damage to stream habi-

tat. In this type of situation, measuring the biological community is a much better tool for identify-
ing problems.

Insights to Share with Other Tribes
Fort Peck Tribes believe that biological assessment tools are especially useful for environmental
management programs with limited staff and resources. For example:
# Office of Environmental Protection used one full-time staff person, plus 10 percent
of a nearby college biologist’s time, and a summer intern,
# Start-up and maintenance costs for equipment for biological assessment were
relatively low.
# They did all sampling and analysis in-house, eliminating the cost of sending
samples out for analysis.
# Because biological techniques detect degraded biological conditions regardless of the
cause, they can be more effective than other approaches at identifying problems caused
by agricultural nonpoint sources, which are common on many Indian reservations.

For Further Information Contact
Deb Madison

Office of Environmental Protection

Fort Peck Tribes

Poplar, MT

Phone 406-768-5155

E-mail: twohorses@nemontel.net
www.fortpecktribes.org