Performance of National Maps of Watershed Integrity at Watershed Scales

Abstract

Watershed integrity, the capacity of a watershed to support and maintain ecological processes essential to the sustainability of services provided to society, can be influenced by a range of landscape and in-stream factors. Ecological response data from four intensively monitored case study watersheds exhibiting a range of environmental conditions and landscape characteristics across the United States were used to evaluate the performance of a national level Index of Watershed Integrity (IWI) at regional and local watershed scales. Using Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r), and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (rs), response variables displayed highly significant relationships and were significantly correlated with IWI and ICI (Index of Catchment Integrity) values at all watersheds. Nitrogen concentration and flux-related watershed response metrics exhibited significantly strong negative correlations across case study watersheds, with absolute correlations (|r|) ranging from 0.48 to 0.97 for IWI values, and 0.31 to 0.96 for ICI values. Nitrogen-stable isotope ratios measured in chironomids and periphyton from streams and benthic organic matter from lake sediments also demonstrated strong negative correlations with IWI values, with |r| ranging from 0.47 to 0.92, and 0.35 to 0.89 for correlations with ICI values. This evaluation of the performance of national watershed and catchment integrity metrics and their strong relationship with site level responses provides weight-of-evidence support for their use in state, local and regionally focused applications.

Distribution of Antibiotic-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae Pathogens in Potable Spring Water of Eastern Indian Himalayas: Emphasis on Virulence Gene and Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Escherichia coli

“…In India, E. coli isolated from the Ganga river showed resistance to antibiotics cephalosporin (37%), ampicillin (20%), amoxicillin (20%), tetracycline (20%), and ciprofloxacin (5.30%) ( Biswas et al, 2015 ). Similarly, several studies had reported the presence of antibiotic-resistant E. coli in different environmental and clinical samples ( Sayah et al, 2005 ; Ram et al, 2007 , 2008 ; Li et al, 2010 ; Tagoe et al, 2011 ; Guo et al, 2014 , 2017 ; Adzitey et al, 2015 ; Chen et al, 2017 ; Muringani, 2017 ; Amer et al, 2018 ; Diwan et al, 2018 ; Igwaran et al, 2018 ; Lu et al, 2018 ; Mishra et al, 2018 ; Mitali et al, 2018 ; Vital et al, 2018 ; Amador et al, 2019 ; Sandhu et al, 2019 ). Study on distribution of ARGs in the present study reflects that the spring water of Sikkim are reservoirs of multiple ARGs.…”

Applying the index of watershed integrity to the Matanuska–Susitna basin

“…We acknowledge that the results of this IWI analysis were not validated with aquatic data as has been done for the conterminous United States IWI analysis (Kuhn et al 2018;Thornbrugh et al 2018;Johnson, Leibowitz, and Hill 2019). Though data do exist for the Matanuska-Susitna basin, these are generally collected opportunistically for project-specific purposes and mostly focus on the Wasilla-Palmer core area.…”

Consideration of spatial and temporal scales in stream restorations and biotic monitoring to assess restoration outcomes: A literature review, part 2

“…Integrity, are used to quantify and compare integrity at wholewatershed scale with that of the more local drainage of individual stream segments to assess the scales of stressors in the individual segments (Johnson, Leibowitz, & Hill, 2019;Kuhn et al, 2018;Thornbrugh et al, 2018).…”