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USING WATERSHED COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE AS INDICATORS OF ESTUARINE CONDITION
Citation:
Nicholson, M. C., S Rego, S S. Hale, J A. Kiddon, H Walker, AND J Copeland. USING WATERSHED COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE AS INDICATORS OF ESTUARINE CONDITION. Presented at International Symposium of the International Association for Landscape Ecology, US Chapter, Banff, Alberta, Canada, April 4-6, 2003.
Description:
Many researchers examining relationships between water quality and the surrounding watershed have focused on landscape metrics associated with composition (e.g., % of the whole watershed in agriculture) often excluding measures of landscape structure. In addition, little work has been conducted on the relationship between land use and aquatic condition beyond fresh water systems. We are investigating how the spatial arrangement (pattern) of elements within watersheds impacts water and sediment quality in estuaries. Results suggest that the position of specific human land uses within a watershed impacts estuarine condition. For example, 50% more variance was explained in a related study on estuarine sediment metal concentrations by restricting analyses to land use within 10km of estuarine sampling stations than in an analysis of the whole watershed (Comeleo et al 1996). In addition, the overall relationship between land use and estuarine condition varied with scale. We report on these findings and on our efforts to develop a set of watershed measurements that may be useful for indicating or predicting estuarine condition.