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Landforms of Urban Watersheds
Citation:
Herrmann, D., A. Berland, A. Prues, A. Garmestani, AND W. Shuster. Landforms of Urban Watersheds. 2018 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Washington, DC, December 10 - 14, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
This study advances understanding of how to assess land in urban social-ecological systems, which has critical ramifications in the face of environmental change. In the long-term, understanding urban social-ecological systems has broad-scale implications for the environment in the United States, with particular interest for Regions and communities.
Description:
Landforms – specifically hillslope forms and resulting processes – couple terrestrial and aquatic systems. In urban watersheds, soil is commonly moved and shaped to accomplish land and water management objectives of residents and municipal agencies. Here, we ask, how does urbanization affect the amount and distribution of hillslope forms within watersheds? We delineated watersheds of 1st and 2nd order streams in the urbanized Cleveland, Ohio, USA metropolitan area and in nearby non-urbanized references areas in the same physiographic province. For those watersheds, we determined the land cover for 5 hillslope position classes – summit, shoulder, backslope, footslope, and toeslope. Our finding show hillslope forms are extensively modified in urban relative to reference watersheds. Most prominently, urban hillslope form was oriented around legal boundaries and physical infrastructures, specifically parcels and streets. As a result, the degree to which hillslope positions were modified from pre-urbanization conditions depended on development patterns (e.g., size and arrangement of parcels). Findings from this investigation can inform urban watershed management at the hillslope scale, an intermediate scale of urban ecosystems (i.e., between parcel and low-order watershed) that can be leveraged to meet terrestrial and aquatic systems related ecosystem service objectives. It also indicates potential ways to modify urbanization practices to conserve geophysical terrain diversity to manage for biodiversity in urban landscapes and to confer the ecological resilience of similar landscapes to urban systems.