EARLY HEARING DETECTION AND INTERVENTION VIRTUAL CONFERENCE
MARCH 2-5, 2021

(Virtually the same conference, without elevators, airplane tickets, or hotel room keys)

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5/21/2018  |   9:45 AM - 10:00 AM   |  POPULATION DENSITY, URBAN STRUCTURE, AND STREAMS   |  310 A

POPULATION DENSITY, URBAN STRUCTURE, AND STREAMS

The intensive land use associated with dense human populations is detrimental to local watershed condition. High levels of impervious surface produce elevated runoff and associated nutrient and contaminant loads that contribute to geomorphic instability and degraded ecological structure and function. Exclusion of urban development can therefore protect individual small watersheds. However, at broader regional scales, change in population is a boundary condition driven by external social and economic forces, and the associated land use change depends on the distribution and density of people and commerce. At those scales, high density may have beneficial effects on regional water quality through reduction of urban land footprint, which is appropriately evaluated on a per capita rather than a per area basis. Higher population densities have a variety of other environmental costs (air quality, urban heat island) and benefits (energy efficiency and habitat preservation), and each of these costs and benefits may respond differently to population density and land use intensity. Effective watershed planning will benefit from understanding the tradeoffs among these important ecological values, and how they respond to different patterns of urbanization across different scales.

  • Landscape
  • Policy
  • Urban

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Presenters/Authors

Jim Heffernan (), Duke University, james.heffernan@duke.edu;


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