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Combining the U.S. National Lake Assessment and the USGS MRB1 Sparrow Model to Estimate the Potential of Northeastern Lakes to Provide Cultural Ecosystem Serivces
Citation:
MILSTEAD, W. B., H. A. WALKER, J. W. HOLLISTER, AND N. C. Kamman. Combining the U.S. National Lake Assessment and the USGS MRB1 Sparrow Model to Estimate the Potential of Northeastern Lakes to Provide Cultural Ecosystem Serivces. Presented at National Water Qualtiy Monitoring Council, 7th National Monitoring Conference, Denver, CO, April 25 - 29, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation is part of a National Lakes Assessment workshop at the National Water Quality Monitoring Council meeting in Denver (April 2010). Summer nutrient concentrations from NLA are compared to annual flux based estimates from the SPARROW model. Objective measures of lake water quality are used to predict aesthestic appeal of lakes in the northeastern U.S.A.
Description:
Lakes provide a variety of ecosystem service benefits that are important to communities in the United States. Standard water quality indicators can be used to assess a lake’s potential to provide ecosystem services such as provisioning of water for domestic, industrial, and agriculture use. In contrast cultural services such as the provisioning of recreation opportunities and housing amenities may be more strongly influenced by perceived water quality in conjunction with socio-economic factors such as proximity to population centers, ease of access, substitutability, and the location of complementary amenities. Both objective and subjective measures of water quality were collected from over 1000 lakes during the 2007 National Lake Assessment. Field crew ratings of “Disturbance Level”, “Biotic Integrity”, “Trophic State”, “Aesthetic Quality”, “Swimmability”, and “Recreation Value” are closely associated with nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations, water clarity, local land use patterns, and habitat variables. These relationships can be used to develop ecological production functions that relate measured water quality to perceived water quality and biotic integrity. In this talk estimated nitrogen and phosphorus loads to Northeastern U.S. Lakes from the USGS MRB1 SPARROW model and NLA data and used to infer the potential of lakes to provide cultural ecosystem service benefits at the regional level.