A multi-scale approach to prioritize wetland restoration for watershed-level water quality improvement
Abstract
Wetland restoration is commonly presented as an important strategy for maintaining
and enhancing the water quality and ecological capital of watershed-scale ecosystems.
Prioritizing restoration sites on the landscape is often a haphazard process based
on widely held, though often untested, assumptions about relationships between watershed
characteristics and water quality. We present a framework to target and prioritize
wetland restoration locations using both regional and watershed-level screening models.
The regression-tree and random forest models presented in this paper identify watershed
variables with the strongest relationships to a given water quality parameter, present
a clear hierarchy of variable importance, and present approximate thresholds in watershed
area where these variables express the greatest impact on water quality. The proportion
of watersheds classified as prior-converted agricultural land was an important predictor
of both ortho and total phosphorus. Fortunately because prior-converted agricultural
lands were historically wetlands, they are often very suitable for wetland restoration.
These sites often have poorly-drained soils requiring artificial drainage to be suitable
for agriculture. These drainage systems become conduits for transporting phosphorus
from agricultural field and to area streams and rivers. Maintaining natural land-cover
within stream buffers is identified as another important predictor of water quality.
This seems to be especially true with regard to NO 3 -NO 2 concentrations. Our model
results support specific management recommendations including: (a) exclusion of agricultural
land-uses from riparian buffers, (b) maintaining or increasing watershed-level wetland-cover
and (c) reducing wetland fragmentation. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15723Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s11273-010-9188-9Publication Info
Flanagan, N; & Richardson, CJ (2010). A multi-scale approach to prioritize wetland restoration for watershed-level water
quality improvement. Wetlands Ecology and Management, 18(6). pp. 695-706. 10.1007/s11273-010-9188-9. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15723.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Neal Flanagan
Visiting Assistant Professor
Curtis J. Richardson
Research Professor of Resource Ecology in the Division of Environmental Science and
Policy
Curtis J. Richardson is Professor of Resource Ecology and founding Director of the
Duke University Wetland Center in the Nicholas School of the Environment. Dr. Richardson
earned his degrees from the State University of New York and the University of Tennessee.
His research interests in applied ecology focus on long-term ecosystem response to
large-scale perturbations such as climate change, toxic materials, trace metals, flooding,
or nutrient additions. He has specific interests in phosphor
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