Convergent Surface Water Distributions in U.S. Cities
Abstract
Earth's surface is rapidly urbanizing, resulting in dramatic changes in the abundance,
distribution and character of surface water features in urban landscapes. However,
the scope and consequences of surface water redistribution at broad spatial scales
are not well understood. We hypothesized that urbanization would lead to convergent
surface water abundance and distribution: in other words, cities will gain or lose
water such that they become more similar to each other than are their surrounding
natural landscapes. Using a database of more than 1 million water bodies and 1 million
km of streams, we compared the surface water of 100 US cities with their surrounding
undeveloped land. We evaluated differences in areal (A WB) and numeric densities (N
WB) of water bodies (lakes, wetlands, and so on), the morphological characteristics
of water bodies (size), and the density (D C) of surface flow channels (that is, streams
and rivers). The variance of urban A WB, N WB, and D C across the 100 MSAs decreased,
by 89, 25, and 71%, respectively, compared to undeveloped land. These data show that
many cities are surface water poor relative to undeveloped land; however, in drier
landscapes urbanization increases the occurrence of surface water. This convergence
pattern strengthened with development intensity, such that high intensity urban development
had an areal water body density 98% less than undeveloped lands. Urbanization appears
to drive the convergence of hydrological features across the US, such that surface
water distributions of cities are more similar to each other than to their surrounding
landscapes. © 2014 The Author(s).
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8395Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1007/s10021-014-9751-yPublication Info
Steele, MK; Heffernan, JB; Bettez, N; Cavender-Bares, J; Groffman, PM; Grove, JM;
... Roy Chowdhury, R (2014). Convergent Surface Water Distributions in U.S. Cities. Ecosystems, 17(4). pp. 685-697. 10.1007/s10021-014-9751-y. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/8395.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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