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A survey of the Trichoptera of the Fort Campbell Military Reservation, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT -- Fort Campbell Military Reservation includes 105,000 acres in Christian and Trigg counties, Kentucky and Montgomery and Stewart counties, Tennessee. The Reservation is located within the Highland Rim Section of the Interior Low Plateaus Province. The goal of the present investigation was to survey the accessible streams on the Reservation using light traps to capture adult insects and to assess the diversity of caddisflies present. A total of 106 species of caddisflies was identified during this study on the Reservation. Twenty-two species represent new records of caddisflies in Kentucky and 11 species represent new records in Tennessee. Fifteen species captured during this investigation represent new records for the Middle Tennessee region.

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This study was conducted as part of a biodiversity initiative recently implemented at the Fort Campbell Military Reservation (FTC). The first phases of this initiative were implemented to investigate the aquatic faunal components of FTC. In addition to Trichoptera, one of the authors (B. H. Bauer) is also conducting studies on the diversity of adult Ephemeroptera and aquatic Coleoptera; as well as surveying FTC streams for fishes and aquatic snails.

The issue of managing FTC's natural resources to maintain or improve biodiversity is important because the Department of Defense (DoD) has management responsibility for more than 25 million acres of public land within the United States (Leslie et al., 1996). In 1996, the Army managed 50 percent of these 25 million acres. With regard to total acreage, DoD was the third largest federal departmental land manager, after the Department of the Interior and the United States Department of Agriculture.

In the late 1980s, DoD initiated a directive for development of an Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan (INRMP) for each installation (Department of Defense Directive 4700.4, January 24, 1989). These INRMPs were intended to coordinate competing land use requirements. The INRMPs have provided a new approach to resource management that includes balancing natural resource management with operational/training objectives. Development of the Integrated Training Area Management (ITAM) program has resulted in the application of geographic information system (GIS) technology to interrelate analyses of land condition and training requirements. This allows natural resources managers to alert operations/training planners to potential environmental issues and to obtain timely information on training and testing plans.

Leslie et al. (1996) provides a detailed analysis of the need to conserve the natural heritage of military lands. The principal conclusions presented in Leslie et al. (1996) point to the need to sustain natural landscapes that provide training and testing opportunities for maintaining military readiness as well as a need to conduct ecosystem management to protect sensitive ecological communities and to mitigate for environmental impacts that may occur during training and testing operations on military lands.

Proper conservation of biological diversity in terrestrial and aquatic habitats on FTC is vital to sustaining the military mission. Goals of the FTC INRMP (Fort Campbell, 2003) include maintaining healthy ecosystems and restoring degraded ecosystems to their historic functions and values. Adherence to this conservation mandate requires sufficient data be available to determine the potential of an activity to cause an environmental disturbance affecting biological communities.

The present investigation provides valuable data that will be used by FTC personnel in furtherance of the INRMP goals noted above. The objective of this study was to survey FTC (excluding impact areas, firing ranges, and the highly populated and developed cantonment area) for adult aquatic insects, and to identify species of the order Trichoptera (caddisflies). Caddisflies are important components of the food chain at FTC. While the food chain involves the entirety of the faunal communities in an intricate and complex web of relationships, some key members of the FTC fauna include two endangered species, the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis Miller and Allen) and the gray bat (M. grisescens Howell), that forage over streams and feed upon adult insects including caddisflies.

Brack and Laval (1985) in a study of the feeding preferences of Indiana bats in Missouri found that moths dominated the diet of Indiana bats. Beetles and caddisflies also were preyed upon, with the greatest numbers of beetles and caddisflies in samples from July on a date when moth consumption was at its lowest. Gray bats primarily consume flying insects emerging from aquatic life stages including flies (Diptera), beetles (Coleoptera), mayflies (Ephemeroptera), stoneflies (Plecoptera), and caddisflies (Clawson, 1984;...

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