Landscape characterization for watershed management

Streams and rivers serve as integrators of terrestrial landscape characteristics and as recipients of pollutants from both the atmosphere and the land; thus, large rivers are especially good indicators of cumulative impacts. Landscape ecologists seek to better understand the relationships between landscape structure and ecosystem processes at various spatial scales. Understanding how scale, both data resolution and geographic extent, influences landscape characterization and how terrestrial processes affect water quality are critically important for model development and translation of research results from experimental watersheds to management of large drainage basins. Measures of landscape structure are useful to monitor change and assess the risks it poses to ecological resources. Many studies have shown that the proportion of different land uses within a watershed can account for some of the variability in surface water quality. Hunsaker and Levine showed that both proportion of land uses and the spatial pattern of land uses is important for characterizing and modeling water quality; however, proportion consistently accounted for the most variance (40% to 86%) across a range of watershed sizes (1000 to 1.35 million ha). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is performing a demonstration of its Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) for the Mid-Atlantic Region. One activity, the Mid-Atlantic Integrated Assessment, is designed as a collaborative initiative between EPA`s Office of Research and Development and EPA`s Region III