Beginning in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana and the southern part of Glacier National Park, the Middle Fork of the Flathead River flows through narrow canyons until it reaches the glacier-carved Nyack Flood Plain.  The floodplain is home to numerous wildlife species, including threatened grizzly bear, gray wolf, and bull trout.  As the river enters the upstream end of the valley, 30 percent of the flow enters a shallow aquifer (hyporheic) before eventually re-entering to the river channel down stream.  An abundance of large-bodied insects with life cycle stages uniquely tied to the hyporheic habitat have been discovered here.  This terrestrial to aquatic interface can be visualized as a pristine food web where nutrients washed from the forest floor are “re-packaged” into microorganisms and then transferred to aquatic insects, who, in turn, are consumed by fish, and so on up the food chain. Hyporheic habitats, found throughout the world, are critical to nutrient cycles that maintain and rejuvenate all of life in the river corridor. Despite their importance, the microorganisms of the hyporheos are largely unknown.  Understanding who they are and what controls their diversity and abundance is the overarching goal of the Nyack Microbial Observatory.

The project site is the Nyack Floodplain Research Natural Area, operated by the Flathead Lake Biological Station (http://www.umt.edu/biology/flbs/home.htm) in cooperation with the John Dalimata Family, the National Park Service and the US Forest Service. A separate NSF project (http://www.umt.edu/biology/flbs/Research/Biocomplexity.htm) has mapped the flood plain hyporheic boundary in 3 dimensions and has installed approximately 100 sampling wells.  Using this infrastructure, the Nyack Microbial Observatory will explore the hyporheic community with the intent to quantify, cultivate, and characterize novel microorganisms and measure factors that shape the microbial community and link microbial diversity to higher organisms.  We seek a broader understanding of floodplain/river health as mediated by flux of water and materials through the river and its floodplain aquifer.  The 5 year project, beginning in summer of 2004 will use a suite of innovative molecular, microbiological, and hydrological tools to monitor microbial communities across seasons and along this unique hyporheic gradient.