Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds
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Transcript of Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds
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Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the
Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds
Karin Limburg, Karen Stainbrook, Bongghi HongSUNY College of Environmental
Science & Forestry
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(1974!)
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Ecosystem health, qu’est-ce que c’est? - a concept that’s been around a long time, currently enjoying a comeback
• maintenance of “biotic integrity”
• resistance and/or resilience of systems in the face of disturbance
• absence of factors that degrade ecological population, community, and ecosystem structure and function
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Assessing watershed health:
The idea: organisms and ecosystems integrate and reflect the insults (or lack thereof) resulting from watershed-level processes
Some techniques have proven robust after 25+ years of testing; others in development
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Low Human influence High
Met
ric B
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Ecosystem indicators of human disturbance should ideally be sensitive to these factors, and not confounded by natural ones
(or at least possible to tease out the differences)
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Indicators of ecosystem health can (should?) evaluate changes at levels of
•Population•Community/habitat•Whole-system
Metrics may not all be additive, although many schemes designed that way
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What we looked at:• physical habitat characterizations
• water chemistry
• biotic community structure (fish and bugs)
• ecosystem function
Total of 33 sites
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tributarymainstem
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Physical habitat – involved making many measurements of flow, stream dimensions, substrate types, vegetative cover, bank characteristics, riparian zone, etc
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Water chemistry: four synoptic surveys conducted May - August – get high and low flow conditions
The idea: to characterize the nutrient environment that indicates whether or nor an ecosystem will be eutrophic or just “well balanced” (very few, if any, sites here expected to be oligotrophic…)
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Water chemistry parameters we measured:
• Dissolved O2, pH, temperature, conductivity in the field
• Chlorophyll, TSS, particulate C & N, total N & P, NO3, NH4, TDN, SRP, TDP, DSi, DOC, TDS in the lab
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Indexes of biotic integrity (IBI): collected fish by electrofishing 100 m of stream –
Noted species, abundances, lengths & weights, obvious diseases, etc.
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Macroinvertebrate (stream insect) IBIs: collected 3 representative kick-samples, identified insects to lowest “reasonable” taxonomic unit
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Ecosystem-level measurements:
Community metabolism
Food web linkages
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Some results: how “healthy” are the Wappingers and Fishkill Creek watersheds?
Let’s look at a few diagnostics…
Land use patterns
Environmental quality patterns
Biological indicators
…includes changes over time
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Assessments at different spatial scales(relates to the degree of influence)
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Amount of land in different uses varied at different spatial scales
Per
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Local Sub-basin IntegratedSpatial scale
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Conductivity – a measure of the ionic strength of water
Correlates strongly with human disturbance (population density, road density, nitrates, etc.)
Getting recognition as a bellwether of aquatic disturbance
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Water quality score Habitat score Nutrient score Physicalcharacteristics
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Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI) Scores
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Cumulative watershed area (km2)
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ITR H' EPT DOM PMA FBI BAP
Aquatic insect metrics
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Presence of “threshold effects”?
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”under-built” ”overbuilt”
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Last bits: some time trends.
• Land use change, 1992 vs. 2001
• Changes in Fishkill biotic indexes
• Some projections about % impervious surfaces (from models)
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EPT FBI BAP ITR IBI FSR
Biotic metric
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Comparing bio-indicator scores in Fishkill: across the board improvement since 1988!
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Percent impervious surface:
Current conditions in Wappingers watershed
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A simulated look at the future, with new housing generated, but classified as “low intensity”
(i.e., with relatively low percent impervious surface)
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Simulated future, with new housing, but with it classified as “high intensity”
Lots more impervious surface
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Can also begin to make crude forecasts of effects, too…
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Summary: how is the “health” of the two watersheds?
• Land use cover: similar at large scale, but Fishkill seems more developed near the sites of stream studies
• Stream quality indicators: Fishkill worse off
• Biological indicators: Fishkill worse off
• Yet, Fishkill in 2001 has better bio-scores than in 1988
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Finally, future development will likely increase things like impervious surfaces and thus increase stream degradation
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Thank you!
Funded by Hudson River Foundation and National Science Foundation