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EPA ’s ECOLOGICAL MODELS FOR INTEGRATED WATERSHED MANAGEMENT
Citation:
RASHLEIGH, B., M. C. BARBER, AND S. M. CORMIER. EPA ’s ECOLOGICAL MODELS FOR INTEGRATED WATERSHED MANAGEMENT. Presented at 2008 National Monitoring Conference, Atlantic City, NJ, May 18 - 22, 2008.
Impact/Purpose:
these EPA modeling and decision support systems allow monitoring data to be integrated into analyses that evaluate ecosystem effects of environmental change and explore alternative management policy options. The combination of high-quality data and mechanistic models in all disciplines would be the ideal approach to forecasting ecological responses to land use and climate changes in watersheds.
Description:
Aquatic ecological populations and communities are affected by the nature and quality of the water in which they live. Specific factors that affect instream biota include chemical variables, biotic interactions, energy source, flow regime, and habitat structure. As watershed management becomes more holistic and comprehensive, managers have become increasingly interested in the dynamics and functioning of the aquatic ecosystem and the relation of landscape processes to aquatic endpoints. The U.S. EPA has developed multiple modeling and decision support approaches to allow monitoring data to be used to support these more comprehensive questions. Three of these approaches, CADDIS, BASS, and AQUATOX, are most useful in integrated watershed management.