Use of landscape and land use parameters for classification and characterization of watersheds in the mid-Atlantic across five physiographic provinces

Abstract

The Atlantic Slope Consortium (ASC) is a project designed to develop and test a set of indicators in coastal systems that are ecologically appropriate, economically reasonable, and relevant to society. The suite of indicators will produce integrated assessments of the condition, health and sustainability of aquatic ecosystems based on ecological and socioeconomic information compiled at the scale of estuarine segments and small watersheds. The research mandate of the ASC project is the following:Using a universe of watersheds, covering a range of social choices, we ask two questions:• How ''good'' can the environment be, given those social choices?• What is the intellectual model of condition within those choices, i.e., what are the causes of condition and what are the steps for improvement?As a basis for compiling ecological indicators, a watershed classification system was required for the experimental design. The goal was to develop approximately five categories of watersheds for each physiographic province, utilizing landscape and land use parameters that would be predictive of aquatic resource condition. All 14-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) watersheds in the Mid-Atlantic region would then be classified according to the regime. Five parameters were utilized for the classification: three land cover categories, consisting of forested, agricultural, and urban, median slope or median elevation, and total *Corresponding author. 12, 209-223, 2005 1352-8505 Ó 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. Environmental and Ecological Statisticsvariance of land covers in 1-km-radius circles positioned on all stream convergence points in a specified 14-digit HUC watershed. Cluster analysis utilizing these five parameters resulted in approximately five well-defined watershed classes per physiographic province. The distribution of all watersheds in the Mid-Atlantic region across these categories provides a unique report on the probable condition of watersheds in the region.

Hydrologic system complexity and nonlinear dynamic concepts for a catchment classification framework

“…Beckinsale, 1969;Haines et al, 1988), landscape and land use parameters (e.g. Merz and Blöschl, 2004;Wardrop et al, 2005), similarity indices (e.g. Olden and Poff, 2003;Ali et al, 2012), eco-hydrologic factors (e.g.…”

An Adaptive Landscape Classification Procedure using Geoinformatics and Artificial Neural Networks

“…Classifiers, k-nearest neighbor, Ward's method, logistic regression, Support Vector Machine, decision trees, and Bayesian networks (Bathgate and Duram, 2003;Caratti et al, 2004;Fritzke and Loos, 1997;Michie et al, 1994;Wardrop et al, 2005).…”

“…A statistical model commonly used in landscape classification is Ward's (1963) agglomerative hierarchical clustering (Bolliger, 2005;Bolliger and Mladenoff, 2005;Lin, 2006;Osinski, 2003;Wardrop et al, 2005). The model groups the input data in an iterative bottom-up (i.e., agglomerative) style, where in the first processing step all data points, j , make up their own individual clusters, i , such that j = i .…”

A Stream–Wetland–Riparian (SWR) index for assessing condition of aquatic ecosystems in small watersheds along the Atlantic slope of the eastern U.S.

“…For the purpose of developing the SWR Index, we selected a subset of 24 small (approximately HUC-14) watersheds in the Mid-Atlantic portion of the Atlantic Slope (>3,000 were available), based on a stratification of ecoregions, land use type, and topographic slope classes (Wardrop et al 2005) (Fig. 3, Table 2).…”