Resource Assessment and Monitoring

MDC manages Missouri’s aquatic resources and works to improve aquatic habitat and water quality all over the state. In 1998, leadership recognized the need for standardized sampling and a reliable database to prioritize, manage, and report the conditions of Missouri’s watersheds, or areas of land that drain into creeks, streams, and rivers. 

Two years later in 2000, the first pilot studies for the Resource Assessment and Monitoring (RAM) Program began. Fast forward to 2026 and the RAM Program is still sampling across Missouri and has collected data from more than 2,800 sites. 

“This past and ongoing work allows us to determine the effectiveness of our management programs, the seriousness of present and future environmental threats, and to collect status and trend information on Missouri’s wadeable streams, or streams just below 5 feet deep,” said Sherry Fischer, science unit supervisor, who oversees the RAM Program. 

What is RAM?

The RAM Program uses standardized sampling methods to build a baseline set of data for Missouri’s stream fish and macroinvertebrate communities, including small animals lacking a backbone but large enough to be seen with the naked eye, such as worms, snails, mollusks, crayfish, leeches, and many types of insects. Also included are water quality and habitat data. 

All this information is used to assess long-term trends in the health of Missouri’s streams. This data provides information on Missouri’s aquatic communities and populations, identifies links between these populations and watershed quality, tracks changes in stream health in relation to restoration efforts, and allows for comparisons within and between watersheds. 

“Additionally, it allows us to answer questions such as ‘Are we conserving Missouri’s aquatic resources?’ and ‘Where should we focus funding to complete this goal?’” Fischer said. 

The RAM Program shares data upon request with partner agencies, including nongovernmental organizations, universities, and private partners. The program also reports to citizens and legislators about the status, condition, and trends of Missouri’s aquatic resources. 

“This data also allows us to prioritize watersheds for conservation, preservation, management, and rehabilitation,” Fischer said. “We can also step in when comprehensive community sampling is required to respond to a major stream disturbance, like large-scale pollution.”

Sites are randomly selected from across the state each year to provide representative samples. Samples may be pulled from any of the state’s 68,000 headwaters (small streams, springs, and wetlands that join to form rivers), spanning 801,569 miles, and 29,000 warmwater, wadeable sites, spanning 236,121 miles. 

“In addition to the randomly selected sites, we also sample a small number of reference sites, which were identified early in the program,” Fischer said. “These reference sites were selected to be representative of a healthy stream within the watershed and are resampled so that we can make comparisons of stream health trends over time.” 

RAM: A Typical Season

Field crews are hired in the spring and start scouting randomly selected sites from late-April to mid-May. At the end of May, all crews attend training to learn how to use equipment and follow standardized protocol when sampling a site. The field season officially starts on June 1. Crews travel through Sept. 15, sampling sites scouted and selected in the spring. 

At each site, water quality is assessed using handheld meters that measure temperature, dissolved oxygen (the amount of oxygen in the water), pH, water clarity, and conductivity (the measure of how an electric charge can pass through water). Water is filtered to collect a chlorophyll sample, which comes from single-celled algae that indicates the productivity of the stream. Water samples are also processed for nutrients and minerals, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, dissolved organic carbon, calcium, magnesium, and sodium. 

To assess fish communities, electrofishing and seine nets are used to target different habitat types and groups of fish. Electrofishing uses electricity, conducted through the water to temporarily stun fish, which are then scooped up with dip nets. This method is most effective in areas with a lot of structure — boulders, root wads, and dense vegetation. Fish collected are identified in the field, if possible, while unknown fish are preserved and identified later in the lab. 

Crews also assess a site’s physical habitat. This includes information about the stream channel (depth and width), substrate size (sand, gravel, boulder) and embeddedness, canopy cover, riparian vegetation structure (proportion of large trees, shrubs, and grasses), human influence (presence of roads, dams, buildings, and agriculture), large woody debris, fish cover, and slope and sinuosity (a measure of a stream’s curviness). 

Starting on Sept. 15, sites sampled earlier in the season are now sampled for macroinvertebrates. Aquatic kick nets with a fine mesh are used and different habitat types are targeted at each site, allowing a better understanding of the whole macroinvertebrate community. 

“Macroinvertebrates have varying sensitivities to water pollution, so we can tell a lot about water quality by the individuals we find,” Fischer said. “Streams throughout the state also have very diverse and distinct habitat types, which determine where and how we sample.” 

RAM Data

Once all the stream fish and macroinvertebrate community, water quality, and habitat data are collected, calculations are conducted integrating different parts of the data to indicate the condition of the sample sites. This information is necessary for documenting and evaluating long-term changes in stream conditions, recognizing problems, and evaluating solutions. 

Further calculations indicate the total number of species and the composition of the communities, habitat conditions, habitat complexity, and disturbance. 

Species distribution information is added to databases within the department and used by biologists to prioritize conservation efforts for sensitive or threatened species. This information is shared with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to aid in their watershed planning, protection, and reporting efforts. Additionally, students and professors at universities, scientists at federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations request access to RAM Program data to inform projects, assess the health of Missouri’s streams, and prioritize aquatic conservation efforts. 

Opportunistic Discoveries

By randomly selecting sites to sample each year, the RAM Program often samples streams with little known information or streams that have never been surveyed. As a result, species are documented that were once thought to be extirpated or were not known to be present in the sample area. 

For example, in 2024 in southeast Missouri, a field crew collected golden topminnows, which had been rarely documented in Missouri prior to 1998 and were thought to be extirpated. 

During the 2025 field season in northwest Missouri, a field crew collected Topeka shiners, which are state and federally endangered, from a watershed where they were historically abundant but thought to be recently extirpated. This finding has resulted in additional monitoring of this population and has informed state efforts for the management of this species. 

The RAM Program also encounters and documents other aquatic organisms beyond fish and macroinvertebrates. 

During the current 2026 field season in southeast Missouri, a field crew encountered a western alligator snapping turtle, which is a species of conservation concern. The crew submitted the site location, habitat data, and photos to MDC’s natural history biologists and state herpetologist. 

Cooperation with Landowners

Most wadeable streams in Missouri flow through private lands, so many of the randomly selected sample sites each year require access permission. 

“Without cooperation from landowners, who care deeply about protecting, managing, and conserving Missouri’s aquatic resources, we would not have access to many stream sections across the state,” Fischer said. “We are very grateful to these landowners who have allowed field crews to access streams from their property.” Landowners are usually happy to learn more about their streams from the results the RAM Program provides.

How are Missouri Streams?

Missouri is proud of its streams, so much so that one of the state’s slogans is “Great Rivers State.” 

So, you may be wondering, how are our Missouri streams doing? 

“Overall, our streams are healthy,” Fischer said. “We do have some areas across the state where we see concerns due to changes in stream habitat, land use changes, and pollution. Streams receive pollution and input from many different sources, so it’s critical that we consider all the impacts happening in a watershed. If something is happening on the land, it’s going to impact stream resources.” 

If you’d like to learn more about streams and get involved, visit mostreamteam.org.

Four Regions of Missouri

Missouri has four distinct regions, each with its own habitat type, that result in differences in the fish and macroinvertebrate communities. 

In the Prairie Region of Missouri (north of the Missouri River and a portion extending south towards southwest Missouri), streams are characterized by having more turbid water with sand or silt bottoms, although many prairie streams in west-central and northeast Missouri have gravel bottoms. 

In the southeast corner of the state, the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV), also referred to as lowlands or the Bootheel, was once covered by swamps and forests but has been extensively ditched for draining and converted to row crop agriculture. Streams in the MAV tend to have soft bottoms, a lot of vegetation, and may be turbid or clear. 

In the Ozark Region of Missouri (south of the Missouri River and between the prairie and MAV regions), streams have a strong gradient with faster flow, and clear, cool water with gravel substrate and submerged vegetation in backwaters and side channels. 

In the Big River Region of Missouri (Missouri and Mississippi rivers), there are many fish species that occur only in these big rivers or are more abundant here. These big rivers drain a large area of land before reaching Missouri, and as a result, reflect water conditions over this large land area, making them unique compared to other large and mid-sized rivers in Missouri.