5.0 Submerged Aquatic Plants on Long Point Bay

5.2.2 Description, distribution and abundance of dominant submerged aquatic plants on Long Point Bay

To find out what food resources were available to migrating waterfowl, LPWWRF (Pauls and Knapton 1993; Knapton and Petrie 1999) studied the distribution and community composition of aquatic macrophytes in Inner Long Point Bay during 1991, 1992 and 1995. Having used comparable methods, Knapton and Petrie (1999) were able to compare their results to the aquatic vegetation work done by Smith in 1976 (Smith 1979). Consequently, much of the information presented in this section has been gleaned from Pauls and Knapton (1993) as well as from Knapton and Petrie (1999). Readers should refer to these documents for a much more descriptive account of morphological characteristics, taxonomy, North American distribution, and reproductive strategies of each of the plant species mentioned below. For the purposes of vegetative as well as invertebrate studies, the Long Point Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Fund has divided the Inner Long Point Bay into 6 sub-areas (Figure 5.1).