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WATERSHED BASED SURVEY DESIGNS
Citation:
Detenbeck, N E., W. F. Greenlee, D. Cincotta, J. M. Denver, AND A R. Olsen. WATERSHED BASED SURVEY DESIGNS. ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, (103):59-81, (2005).
Description:
The development of watershed-based design and assessment tools will help to serve the multiple goals for water quality monitoring required under the Clean Water Act, including assessment of regional condition to meet Section 305(b), identification of impaired water bodies or watersheds to meet Section 303(d), and development of empirical relationships between causes or sources of impairment and biological responses. Creation of GIS databases for hydrology, hydrologically-corrected digital elevation models, and hydrologic derivatives such as watershed boundaries and upstream-downstream topology of subcatchments is providing a consistent seamless nationwide framework for these designs. The elements of a watershed-based sampling frame can be represented either as a continuous infinite set defined by points along a linear stream network, or as a discrete set of watershed polygons defined by HUCs or at stream or river confluences. Watershed-based designs can be developed with existing probabilistic survey methods, including the use of unequal probability weighting, stratification, and two-stage frames for sampling. Case studies for monitoring of Atlantic Coastal Plain streams, West Virginia wadeable streams, and coastal Oregon streams illustrate three different approaches to watershed-based survey designs.