Citation:

LOPEZ, R. D. LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY APPROACHES FOR DETECTING, MAPPING, AND ASSESSING THE VULNERABILITY OF DEPRESSIONAL WETLANDS. Presented at Joint North American Benthological Society and American Geophysical Union Meeting, New Orleans, LA, May 23, 2005 - May 27, 2007.

Impact/Purpose:

Overarching Objectives and Links to Multi-year Planning

This research directly supports long-term goals established in ORD's multi-year research plans related to GPRA Goal 2 (Water Quality) and Long Term Goal WQ-2 Assessment of aquatic systems impairment. Relative to the GRPA Goal 2 Water Quality multi-year plan, this research will "provide tools to assess and diagnose impairment in aquatic systems and the sources of associated stressors" and "provide the tools to restore and protect aquatic ecosystems and to forecast the ecological, economic, and human health outcomes of alternative solutions" (Water Quality Long Term Research Goals 2 and 3).

Subtask 1 - Impervious Surface Evaluation

This subtask addresses the development of impervious surfaces estimators for local to regional scale assessments of watersheds and their landscape relationship to stream ecology. The amount of impervious surface area in a watershed is a key indicator of landscape change. As a single variable, it serves to integrate a number of concurrent interactions that directly influence a watershed's hydrology, stream chemical quality, and in-stream habitat. It is our working hypothesis that impervious surface area within a watershed, as an independently mapped predictor variable, can be used to generally track a range of watershed ecological parameters (e.g., NPS pollution, biological integrity, TMDLs) that are of concern to local, state and federal environmental managers. The specific objectives of this research are: 1) to quantitatively evaluate the varying remote sensing methods used in mapping impervious surfaces at multiple scales (local to regional), and 2) to relate the varying levels of impervious surface area in watersheds to the environmental condition of multiple water resource endpoints such as streamflow, temperature, and biota.



Subtask 2 -- Landscape Assessments and Evaluations of Best Management Practices: Watershed Demonstrations

Best Management Practices (BMP) encompass a range of strategies to reduce water pollution related to urban and agricultural activities. EPA, through Section 319(h) of the Clean Water Act [PL 92-500], provides grants to states to implement BMPs in areas with suspected or known water-quality problems. Grants for implementation of BMPs have not been tracked or monitored to document their effectiveness. Although effectiveness can be measured in many different ways, one straightforward but important measure is existence. Implementation of BMPs is a voluntary process and actual implementation is not always executed (Nowak 1992). The primary objective of this project is to assess the feasibility of using high-resolution aerial photography and other remotely sensed data to identify the existence of BMPs that were planned under the 319 program. An additional objective is to evaluate the effectives of BMPs implemented by examining monitoring data from about 5 sites in the OW National NPS monitoring system.

There are several potential benefits to determining the feasibility of using the aerial photography for identifying BMPs: 1) since BMP implementation is voluntary and some may not be implemented due to a variety of social and economic factors (Nowak 1992), remote detection of BMPs can provide data to estimate the ratio of BMPs implemented to BMPs planned; 2) remote detection of BMPs provides validation data that can be input into EPA's Grants Reporting and Tracking System (GRTS), and 3) remote monitoring of BMPs over time could be used to develop data on BMP lifespans, providing important data related to social- and cost-effectiveness.

Subtask 3 -- TMDL Non-point Source Assessment Tool

This subtask involves the development of a software tool to assess the potential risks of water bodies to exceed TMDL threshold values established by States. When completed, the tool will allow the user to evaluate watersheds over entire regions. The too

Description:

U.S. EPA is using a landscape ecology approach to assess the ecological/hydrologic functions and related human values of depressional wetlands along coastal Texas, considered to be vulnerable to human disturbance. Many of those wetlands may be at high risk because of recent court rulings and associated jurisdictional interpretations. As a result of these rulings and interpretations, the interpreted area of freshwater depressional wetlands within the study region has been dramatically reduced. It is the general nature of the landscape that many of these wetlands are hydrologically connected via shallow ground swals that provide concentrated directional flow during rainfall events, thereby connecting these depressronal wetlands to tributaries. A better underst~nding of the extent of depressional wetlands, regionally and nationally, is critical to inform policy discussions between federal agencies with joint jurisdiction on these scientific, legal, policy, and regulatory issues. Our approach is to integrate remote- sensing, geospatial information, existing field data, and a fJi"iori knowledge of depressional wetland ecology to estimate their extent, connectivity, and ecological/hydrologic functrons. Those functions include support for aquatic life use; decreasing the loss of human life and property damage from floods; providing fish and wildlife habitat; and supporting recreational use of the environment.

Record Details: