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Effects of Landscape Conditions and Management Practices on Lakes in Northeastern USA.
Citation:
Smucker, N. AND N. Detenbeck. Effects of Landscape Conditions and Management Practices on Lakes in Northeastern USA. Presented at North American Diatom Symposium (NADS) 22nd Biennial Meeting, Bar Harbor, ME, August 13 - 17, 2013.
Impact/Purpose:
Lakes continue to face escalating pressures associated with land cover change and growing human populations. Highly diverse diatom assemblages are important to nutrient cycling and food webs in lakes, and they have potential to be informative indicators of landscape impacts and the effectiveness of management practices. By identifying relationships of diatom communities with land cover and physico-chemical parameters, along with generating stressor-response curves, this work will(1) develop diatom indicators responsive to anthropogenic impacts, (2) identify how spatial locations of land cover affect lake conditions and diatoms, (3) inform future assessments and management efforts, and (4) characterize the effects of natural variation and potentially different patterns in diatom responses across regions.
Description:
Lakes continue to face escalating pressures associated with land cover change and growing human populations. The U.S. EPA National Lakes Assessment, which sampled 1,028 lakes during the summer of 2007 using a probabilistic survey, was the first large scale effort to determine the condition of lakes across the country. In addition to broad trends, these data offer an abundance of new opportunities to examine biodiversity patterns, drivers of ecosystem change, and effectiveness of management practices that aim to reduce adverse effects of land cover change. Here, we use 2006 National Land Cover Data and sediment diatom samples collected from the tops of cores to examine how land cover at different spatial extents affects the habitat and diatom communities of lakes. We are examining the effects of land cover in basins, buffers in upstream networks, and buffers adjacent to 188 lakes in regions extending from the Mid-Atlantic to New England. Identifying relationships of diatom communities with land cover and physico-chemical parameters, along with generating stressor-response curves, will help with (1) developing diatom indicators responsive to anthropogenic impacts, (2) identifying how spatial locations of land cover affect lake conditions and diatoms, (3) informing future assessments and management efforts, and (4) characterizing potentially different patterns across regions and the effects of natural variation. Comparisons of study lakes to reference lake conditions will further inform future assessments, land use decisions, and management practices. We are also compiling an inventory of best management practices in basins to examine if they effectively reduce impacts to lakes.