2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
5/25/2021 | 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM | SPATIOTEMPORAL VARIABILITY IN STREAM METABOLISM DOWNSTREAM OF WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANTS | Virtual Platform
SPATIOTEMPORAL VARIABILITY IN STREAM METABOLISM DOWNSTREAM OF WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANTS
Regulation of point-sources to streams has improved water quality across the United States, but concerns continue about the large nutrient loads from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The increase in nutrients is expected to increase metabolism in the stream, but the spatial and temporal impacts have not been well constrained. We monitored dissolved oxygen (DO) for one year at nine sites on a suburban Philadelphia stream with four WWTPs and modeled metabolism upstream and downstream of WWTPs. We found that WWTPs drove the largest increase in gross primary productivity in spring when light was not limiting around 1 km below each plant. However, the impact was spatially limited, with rates returning towards pre-WWTP levels within 3 km. After leaf-out, this impact diminished, and all sites, including those upstream of WWTPs, had metabolism controlled by light availability. Our high temporal and spatial database shows the stream is most likely to fall below minimum DO thresholds upstream of the WWTPs. Longer-term monitoring is more likely to capture more individual instances of non-compliance which may disincentivize the collection of longer term datasets that would reveal more about the functioning of the system.
- Ecohydrology
- Monitoring
- Policy
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Presenters/Authors
Sarah Ledford
(), Georgia State University, sledford@gsu.edu;
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Jacob Diamond
(), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), jakediamond@gmail.com;
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Laura Toran
(), Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Temple University, ltoran@temple.edu;
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