Developed Landscapes and Water Specific Conductance

Now that we are up and running, we can look across our many sites for relationships between watershed attributes and specific conductance (SC). Here, we have calculated the median SC for ~60 sites in our network during the April 1 to June 30, 2013 period, and relate them to watershed forest cover, developed land, and road density. These results are similar to other studies from the region (Daley et al., 2009, Trowbridge et al., 2010, Kelting et al., 2012) which have shown how roads and parking lots drive water SC. The tightness of this relationship should allow us to predict, at broad scales, the impact of watershed development on water salinization and its consequences.

 

Thank you to our partners and staff for building such a great data set that is allowing us to understand water quality like this.