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EVALUATING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN NUTRIENT AND SEDIMENT DYNAMICS, ECOLOGY AND LAND USE IN THE LITTLE MIAMI RIVER WATERSHED
Citation:
MORRISON, M. A., J. P. SCHUBAUER-BERIGAN, C. SCHULTZ, BERNIE B. DANIEL, M. E. TROYER, AND M. B. GRIFFITH. EVALUATING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN NUTRIENT AND SEDIMENT DYNAMICS, ECOLOGY AND LAND USE IN THE LITTLE MIAMI RIVER WATERSHED. Presented at Stormwater Seminar IV: Watershed Research and Design, Dayton, OH, May 12, 2005.
Impact/Purpose:
to present information
Description:
The goal of this project, and associated research, is to establish thresholds for ecological response to land use and disturbance in agricultural and mixed land use watersheds within the Little Miami River Watershed. A secondary goal is to develop tools and insights that will aid in the management of risks and evaluation of best management practice (BMP) effectiveness. These goals will be accomplished through coordinated research in stream ecology (e.g., productivity and stream community metabolism), biogeochemistry (e.g., sorption of P to inorganic and biological particulate matrices and N removal/transformation), geography and geomorphology ( e.g., structure and stability of stream channels). We plan to evaluate, rank and classify streams in terms of their ability to sustain ecological structure and function in response to sediment and nutrient stressors resulting from patterns of land use within the watershed. An overview of ongoing U.S. EPA research projects and selected initial results wil be presented. The focus of the talk will be on the following three areas: 1) variations in nutrient concentration and embeddedness between Level IV Ecoregions in the Little Miami River Watershed; 2) the effect of watershed-scale land use patterns on nutrient enrichment; and 3) the use of stream community metabolism measurements to indicate the severity of land use impacts.