2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference
March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH
6/08/2017 | 9:45 AM - 10:00 AM | A BIG-DATA APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF DROUGHT ON TOTAL DISSOLVED SOLIDS IN STREAMS AND RIVERS | 302B
A BIG-DATA APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF DROUGHT ON TOTAL DISSOLVED SOLIDS IN STREAMS AND RIVERS
Total dissolved solids (measured as specific conductivity, SC) influences the distributions of aquatic organisms, but we can only estimate variation in space and time over limited extents. Reduced precipitation and increased temperatures increase SC, so landscape scales estimates of SC during droughts are needed at to identify location and amounts of SC increase. We related 11,961 SC observations made at 1,756 minimally impaired sites across the conterminous USA between 2001 and 2015 to watershed summaries of static (e.g., geology and soils) and dynamic (e.g., climate, vegetation, and evapotranspiration) environmental predictors using Random Forests. The resulting model explained 92% of the variation in the validation data, with a root mean squared error of 122 µS/cm. We then applied this model to predict monthly SC for every stream segment in the study area over the 15 years, allowing comparisons of SC between drought and non-drought conditions. These comparisons show that SC increases >125 µS/cm occur in some minimally affected streams during summer droughts, potentially leading to local extirpations of aquatic life. These are the authors views and do not necessarily represent views or policies of U.S. EPA.
- S29 Macrosystem Ecology of Aquatic Systems
- C22 Disturbance
- S24 Towards a predictive freshwater ecology: using time-series data to understand and forecast responses to a changing environment
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Presenters/Authors
John Olson
(), Dept of Applied Environmental Science, California State University Monterey Bay, CA, USA, joolson@csumb.edu;
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Lei Zheng
(), previously with Tetra Tech, Inc., lei.zheng@hotmail.com;
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Susan Cormier
(), USEPA, Cormier, Susan
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