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Using National Maps of Watershed and Catchment Integrity to Inform Aquatic Resource Management
Citation:
Leibowitz, Scott G. Using National Maps of Watershed and Catchment Integrity to Inform Aquatic Resource Management. Water Resource Issues Seminar, Corvallis, OR, October 17, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
The Index of Watershed Integrity (IWI) was developed by ORD to calculate and visualize the status of natural watershed infrastructure that supports ecological processes (e.g., nutrient cycling) and services provided to society (e.g., swimmable and fishable waters). The IWI is an accumulation of over 20 landscape stressors (e.g., road-stream crossings, percent urban land use) within 2.6 million watersheds in the conterminous US. This presentation will provide an overview of IWI development, how it has been improved, and assessments of its performance. Four examples of how the IWI has been applied to address specific issues are also include. Finally, the presentation provides an overview on related work under SSWR 3.01B or A&E CIVA 2.3 that make use of spatial analysis. This invited presentation will be given to students in Oregon State University’s Water Resources degree programs. The professor leading the seminar, Dr. Mary Santelmann, requested that the presentation cover water resources research that had real-life management and policy relevance.
Description:
The goal of the Clean Water Act is to restore and maintain the integrity of the nation’s waters. Given that, information on watershed integrity may be useful to environmental managers and policy-makers for meeting that goal. Watershed integrity has been defined as the capacity of a watershed to support and maintain the full range of ecological processes and functions essential to the sustainability of the watershed services provided to society. EPA has developed an Index of Watershed Integrity (IWI) that evaluates watershed integrity by quantifying the presence of stressors (low stressors represent high integrity and vice-versa). The IWI and a related Index of Catchment Integrity (ICI) can be useful for many management efforts ranging from catchment to national scales, especially when combined with local site information. Recently, we evaluated and mapped the IWI and ICI for 2.6 million watersheds in the conterminous US using first-order approximations of relationships between stressors and six watershed functions, along with information from EPA’s StreamCat dataset. This presentation provides an overview of IWI/ICI development, how they have been improved, and assessments of their performance. Four examples of how the IWI/ICI have been applied to address specific issues are also included. The presentation also provides an overview on related work that make use of spatial analysis.