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A REGIONAL ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE GREAT LAKES BASIN
Citation:
Edmonds, C M., D T. Heggem, A C. Neale, AND K B. Jones. A REGIONAL ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE GREAT LAKES BASIN. Presented at Science Forum 2003, Washington, DC, May 5-7, 2003.
Impact/Purpose:
The primary objectives of this research are to:
- Provide information on the variability in water supply that can be expected under varying climatic conditions. Early efforts will be focused on assembling regional databases for at least two counties (Mecklenberg County and York County) within SEQL region that can be used for water supply generation and model development.
- Develop tools that will help improve our ability to evaluate, study, and model linkages between different types of environmental systems: hydrologic, geomorphic, ecological, and climatic.
- Explore the use of annual and seasonal measurements of large lake surface temperatures as a new ecological indicator of the overall thermal content of those lakes, and construct an estimator of seasonal large lake heat budgets.
Description:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Natural Resources Canada: Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) are conducting a cooperative research landscape ecological study of the Great Lakes Basin. The analyses will include the areas located along the border of the United States and Canada. The study area is comprised of watersheds which drain or historically drained into the Laurentian Great Lakes. The Great Lakes contain 18 percent of the earth ' s fresh water and the ecosystem that surrounds the lakes is rich in streams, wetlands, forests, estuaries, breeding birds, biological diversity and many human population centers. The land cover for this analysis was primarily developed by the CCRS and is based on 1990s North American Landscape Characterization (NALC) imagery and the CCRS Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) archive imagery of Canada. The analyses will use delineated watersheds and mapping units of fixed size. The analysis will feature many landscape indicators including the percentage of natural land cover (N-Index), forest fragmentation and estimates of total nitrogen stream loading throughout the basin.
This poster will demonstrate the development of the data set, conversion to land cover, the delineated watershed coverages and models for developing landscape scale ecosystem indicators. Data images are given in ranked order by natural breaks and will provide the viewer with ecosystem conditional relationships throughout the entire Great Lakes Basin. Results from this basic study by EP A and CCRS are presented and future work is expected to include change detection dating back to the early 1970s.