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Morphological characteristics of urban water bodies: mechanisms of change and implications for ecosystem function.
Abstract
The size, shape, and connectivity of water bodies (lakes, ponds, and wetlands) can
have important effects on ecological communities and ecosystem processes, but how
these characteristics are influenced by land use and land cover change over broad
spatial scales is not known. Intensive alteration of water bodies during urban development,
including construction, burial, drainage, and reshaping, may select for certain morphometric
characteristics and influence the types of water bodies present in cities. We used
a database of over one million water bodies in 100 cities across the conterminous
United States to compare the size distributions, connectivity (as intersection with
surface flow lines), and shape (as measured by shoreline development factor) of water
bodies in different land cover classes. Water bodies in all urban land covers were
dominated by lakes and ponds, while reservoirs and wetlands comprised only a small
fraction of the sample. In urban land covers, as compared to surrounding undeveloped
land, water body size distributions converged on moderate sizes, shapes toward less
tortuous shorelines, and the number and area of water bodies that intersected surface
flow lines (i.e., streams and rivers) decreased. Potential mechanisms responsible
for changing the characteristics of urban water bodies include: preferential removal,
physical reshaping or addition of water bodies, and selection of locations for development.
The relative contributions of each mechanism likely change as cities grow. The larger
size and reduced surface connectivity of urban water bodies may affect the role of
internal dynamics and sensitivity to catchment processes. More broadly, these results
illustrate the complex nature of urban watersheds and highlight the need to develop
a conceptual framework for urban water bodies.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/9140Collections
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
James Brendan Heffernan
Associate Professor of Ecosystem Ecology and Ecohydrology
I am interested in major changes in ecosystem structure, particularly in streams,
rivers and wetlands. My work focuses on feedbacks among ecological, physical, and
biogeochemical processes, and uses a wide range of tools and approaches. I am particularly
interested in projects that address both basic ecological theory and pressing environmental
problems. Increasingly, we are applying tools and theories developed for local ecosystems
to better understand ecological patterns and mechanisms at regi

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