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Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds

Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds Karin Limburg, Karen Stainbrook, Bongghi Hong SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry. (1974!).

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Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds

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  1. Detecting Ecological Effects of Development in the Wappingers and Fishkill Watersheds Karin Limburg, Karen Stainbrook, Bongghi Hong SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry

  2. (1974!)

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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) Metric B Metric A Low Human influence High

  6. 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

  7. What we looked at: • physical habitat characterizations • water chemistry • biotic community structure (fish and bugs) • ecosystem function  Total of 33 sites

  8. tributary mainstem

  9. Physical habitat – involved making many measurements of flow, stream dimensions, substrate types, vegetative cover, bank characteristics, riparian zone, etc

  10. 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…)

  11. 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

  12. Indexes of biotic integrity (IBI): collected fish by electrofishing 100 m of stream – Noted species, abundances, lengths & weights, obvious diseases, etc.

  13. Macroinvertebrate (stream insect) IBIs: collected 3 representative kick-samples, identified insects to lowest “reasonable” taxonomic unit

  14. Ecosystem-level measurements: Community metabolism Food web linkages

  15. 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

  16. Assessments at different spatial scales (relates to the degree of influence)

  17. Amount of land in different uses varied at different spatial scales Percent

  18. 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

  19. Presence of “threshold effects”?

  20. ”overbuilt” ”under-built”

  21. Last bits: some time trends. • Land use change, 1992 vs. 2001 • Changes in Fishkill biotic indexes • Some projections about % impervious surfaces (from models)

  22. Comparing bio-indicator scores in Fishkill: across the board improvement since 1988!

  23. Percent impervious surface: Current conditions in Wappingers watershed

  24. A simulated look at the future, with new housing generated, but classified as “low intensity” (i.e., with relatively low percent impervious surface)

  25. Simulated future, with new housing, but with it classified as “high intensity”  Lots more impervious surface

  26. Can also begin to make crude forecasts of effects, too…

  27. 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

  28. Finally, future development will likely increase things like impervious surfaces and thus increase stream degradation

  29. Thank you! Funded by Hudson River Foundation and National Science Foundation

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