Abstract:
Officials with the Long Island Sound Study (LISS) are presently reviewing the
suite of indicators used to assess and report on Long Island Sound’s ecological health and
the programmatic success of the LISS. As part of this evaluation, managers seek to
determine whether there are environmental variables that offer valuable information on
ecosystem condition but that have not historically been tracked, or have not been utilized
to their fullest potential. This paper reviews the use of ecological indicators by the LISS,
explores the literature documenting relationships between land use/land cover and water
quality and documents the use of a geographic information system (GIS) to perform an
analysis of the impact that land use/land cover, slope and soil characteristics have on
turbidity within the Long Island Sound (LIS) drainage basin. This paper then compares
two models’ ability to predict turbidity: the first model includes information on land
use/land cover, slope and soil characteristics while the second accounts for soil
characteristics. Although the land use/land cover-based model outperforms the soil
parameters-based model in predicting stream turbidity, neither model’s predictive ability
is sufficiently strong to accurately forecast turbidity in the study area. These results are
contrary to those documented in previous investigations. Further examination should be
undertaken to determine whether an alternate methodology or inclusion of other relevant
parameters would yield a more robust turbidity model.
