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INTEGRATED RESEARCH PLAN FOR LINKING BMPS AND WATERSHED WATER QUALITY IN SOUTHERN OHIO
Citation:
Nietch*, C AND J. Allen. INTEGRATED RESEARCH PLAN FOR LINKING BMPS AND WATERSHED WATER QUALITY IN SOUTHERN OHIO. Presented at EPA-Science Forum, Washington, DC, June 01 - 03, 2004.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Although it is routine for watershed management programs to coincide the monitoring of land use impacts and water quality at different spatial scales, rarely are the data collected or analyzed in such a strategic manner to be able to study the linkages among ecological systems across a drainage network. At this time, however, there is no clear-cut experimental framework for determining the effectiveness of small-scale management actions at larger watershed scales. This is one of the primary themes that drive the research developed here, in which linkages between small and large scale ecological systems will be studied experimentally and in the context of watershed risk management.
The experimental implications of linking spatial scales for better watershed management means quantitatively deriving relationships between a given stressor loading regime and stream ecology and describing how a given management strategy will affect that loading regime at the subwatershed or catchment scale. At the larger scale, it means having the capability of monitoring the cumulative effects of these load-to-ecology linkages across a watershed where they manifest as water quality in multi-use aquatic ecosystems. Thus, two primary research components have evolved; 1) the development of multiple-scale water quality monitoring tools, and 2) experimental designs that address landscape-level processes (land use/physiography/BMP interactions) and their affect on proximal habitat quality, community assemblages, and, ultimately, the assimilative capacity of low order stream ecosystems.
Key experimental components in the watershed research plan include a) large- to small-scale water quality monitoring and tracking; b) geo-referencing of existing BMP projects for developing spatial-weighting algorithms in load estimation; c) the establishment of small-channel field sites receiving loads from catchments experiencing different levels of BMP implementation; and d) conducting meso-scale experiments at an Experimental Stream Field Station that is mechanistically integrated into the watershed of interest and that will address the relationship of stream ecology as a function of stressor load. Until there is a better means of linking stressor loading characteristics to in-stream biological response, watershed planners will continue to design BMPs and monitoring strategies throughout a watershed with only a conceptual basis for how they affect a desired biotic endpoint. Products from this effort are designed to provide the basis for turning this conceptual understanding into working models for better watershed management.