Published Library Resources

This virtual library holds a wide range of urban forestry resources including: research abstracts and full text journal articles, trade magazine articles, CDs, other technology transfer resources, books (or chapters of books), patents, ordinances, theses and dissertations, and conference proceedings.

Mismanagement by the small landowner: Fact or fiction

The terms "small woodland owner" and "poor forestry practices" have been coupled since the beginning of the application of scientific forestry practices in the South. Early surveys and observation showed this often to be the case. Now, decades later, we still blame the small landowner for much of ...

Maintaining species diversity in the central Appalachians

Species composition is the most important factor that determines the output of benefits from Appalachian forests. Forest managers need to understand the site requirements, regeneration mechanisms, and competitive interactions of hardwood species to prescribe treatments that maintain desired species ...

Living with nature: Are we willing to pay the price

The conflict of values and the risk to resources that results when we mingle urban development with wildland areas is one of the most difficult issues today's resource managers face. It is an increasingly complex situation in virtually every part of the Nation; one for which good solutions simply ...

Where there's fire, there's smoke: Air quality and prescribed burning in Florida

Prescribed burning, the controlled use of fire to achieve land management goals, is a useful tool for resource managers in Florida. Land owners may choose fire to achieve a variety of objectives, such as restoring a fire dependent ecosystem, enhancing forage for cattle, improving wildlife habitat, ...

What is a watershed?

 

Using GIS to predict fire behavior

This paper explores the use of GIS to spatially represent fire behavior under varying assumptions of fuel type, weather condition, and topography. Simulating fire behavior and effects across landscapes facilitates the prediction of future vegetation and habitat conditions. Landscape conditions that ...

The wildland urban interface: A focus on fire protection

There is a growing threat from wildfire to people and their property in what is called the wildland-urban interface zone. An assessment of the movement of people into this zone is essential for effective fire prevention and control planning and interaction with public leaders. Yet the assessments ...

Wildfires in the western Canadian boreal forest: Landscape patterns and ecosystem management

Mimicking of natural disturbance for ecosystem management requires an understanding of the disturbance processes and the resulting landscape patterns. Since fire is the major disturbance in the boreal forest, three widely held beliefs about fire behavior and resulting landscape patterns are ...

Wildfire strikes home in Texas: The report of the governor's conference on rural/suburban fire protection

The enormity of the fire problem in Texas is comparable only to the vastness of the state. The rural areas continue to be subjected to fire losses of great acreages; the metropolitan areas are impacted by severe monetary losses. Both are subjected to unacceptable loss of life. Now a newly ...

Wildfire mitigation in the 1998 Florida wildfires

In April and May, 1998, Florida experienced an unusually severe drought as a result of El Nino. Starting in June, 1998, the state was besieged with a series of wildland fires of increasing intensity, culminating with several massive evacuations and with losses of homes and businesses in the week ...

Wildfire lessons learned; Include fire protection in growth planning

 

Some melaleuca fire relationships including recommendations for home site protection

Melaleuca quinquenervia, an introduced tree with high fire tolerance, is displacing native south Florida vegetation on a variety of sites. Melaleuca has fire adaptations that enhance the survival of established trees, promote reproduction, and increase fire intensity to the detriment of less ...

Societal influences on prescribed burning

Although many resource professionals believe that periodic fire is necessary to the health of fire-adapted ecosystems, prescribed fire exists only because society allows it. Society has given fire managers the authority to determine if, when, and how prescribed burning takes place. In exchange, it ...

The risk perceptions and policy response toward wildland fire hazards by urban home owners

Expanding urban areas have brought an increasing number of people into close proximity to extensively managed wildland, creating a new natural hazard -the wildland fire hazard. Public officials in Southern California, for example, have suggested programs for protecting urban residents. This study ...

The politics of wildfire: Lessons from Yellowstone

Land managers and ecologists generally agree that the 19 88 fires in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem were an ecologically important part of a natural disturbance pattern and that little could have been done to stop them. For policymakers, however, the fires were a major public relations failure. ...

The natural role of fire

To extend knowledge of fire's role in Florida forests, this publication has been developed from scientific literature review and observations by experienced personnel. To be most useful, the general principles that follow must be localized to specific environments or management units. In that way, ...

Urban-wildland fire defense strategy, precision prescribed fire: The Los Angeles county approach

In the County of Los Angeles. critical conditions at the urban-wildland interface range from concentrated development to dispersed development; elevations from sea level to 5000 feet with diverse ecosystems characterized by coastal sage scrub, Chamise, sumac, Ceanothus, Toyon, oak woodlands, pine ...

Urban sprawl

Sprawl is bad aesthetics; it is bad economics. Five acres are being made to do the work of one, and do it very poorly. This is bad for the farmers, it is bad for communities, it is bad for industry, it is bad for utilities, it is and for the railroads, it is bad for the recreation groups, it is ...

Urban-rural interface: City of Rochester upland water supply

There was and continues to be concerted action and reaction by individuals and groups at the interface of rural and urban interests, centered around the ownership, use and treatment of the land, forest and waters of the Hemlock and Canadice Lakes Watershed. The City government has conducted its ...

Urban leisure: Edge city and new leisure periphery

The central question about the out-of-town leisure-consumption phenomenon is whether it is its form that dictates the nature of urban living, or if it is the post-modern city that in fact dictates how the pleasure periphery has developed. The answer appears to be somewhere in between. Vast sheds ...

Reintroduction of fire into fire-dependent ecosystems: Some southern examples

Natural resource problems associated with, or resulting from, attempted fire exclusion are challenging managers across the United States. Critical issues range from epidemic insect and disease conditions to species extirpations. Southern burners continue to demonstrate that seemingly insurmountable ...

Environmental modeling and exposure assessment of sediment-associated fluoranthene in a small, urbanized, nonriverine estuary

Risks posed by fluoranthene (a four-ring polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) in urban runoff were estimated by modeling and exposure assessment of a portion of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, United States. Kinetic rate constants for sediment-associated fluoranthene and fluoranthene runoff ...

Effects of urbanization on base flow of selected south-shore streams, Long Island, New York

Hydrograph analysis of six streams on the south shore of Long Island indicates that eastward urbanization during the last three decades has significantly reduced base flow to streams. Before urbanization, roughly 95 percent of total annual stream flow on Long Island was base flow. In urbanized ...

Effects of septic tank systems on environmental quality

Septic tank systems are used for disposal of domestic wastewater on farms and in aural, suburban and isolated areas in many parts of the world. Environmental impact of septic tank systems is reviewed. Water quality changes that occur in the soil system, especially with reference to nitrogen and ...

Deriving dynamic information on fire fuel distributions in southern California chaparral from remotely sensed data

The major objective of the research reported in this paper was to perform a pilot study for mapping fire fuel properties of southern Californian chaparral shrubs and associated forest ecotones using multi-date (seasonal) Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) image data. Information on past, current and ...

Can urbanization limit iron availability to estuarine algae?

Bioavailable forms of iron are highly unstable in oxygenated saline water, but one way in which iron bioavailability to algae can be enhanced is by chelation to dissolved organic matter (DOM). We hypothesized that urbanization-associated deforestation in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina caused a ...

Buffer zones around water-supply reservoirs

In urbanizing areas, the protection of watersheds draining into potable water reservoirs may present a problem. Growing conflicts are arising between interest in development of land and desire to preserve drinking water supplies from contamination. This paper outlines a strategy designed to ...

Black Tiger fire case study

A human-caused wildland fire starting on July 9,1989 in a scenic part of the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado, swept through residential areas nestled among the trees. Within the first five to six hours after ignition, 44 homes and other structures were destroyed and many others were damaged. ...

Beyond the rhetoric of smart growth

 

Assessing the benefits of reducing fire risk in the wildland-urban interface: A contingent valuation approach

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) residents in Michigan were interviewed using a contingent valuation protocol to assess their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for incremental reductions in the risk of losing their homes to wildfire. WTP was elicited using a probability model which segments the risk of ...

Land-use planning may reduce fire damage in the urban-wildland intermix

The risk of wildfire associated with development in the urban-wildland intermix is nationwide. To wildland fire agencies, providing fire protection for wildland residential development can be an exercise in frustration. Much of the problem is that few convincing ties have been made between ...

Incorporating ecological concepts and biological criteria in the assessment and management of urban nonpoint source pollution

The health and well-being of the aquatic biota in surface waters are important barometers of how effectively we are achieving the goals of the Clean Water Act (CWA); namely, the maintenance and restoration of biological integrity and the basic intent of water quality standards. Yet, these tangible ...

People moving to the countryside: case studies of decision-making

This chapter concentrates on settlements within the rural-urban interface. The main migration factors operating at the regional level are discussed briefly before an examination is undertaken of individual household relocation decisions. In each case, however, account is taken both of the general ...

Patterns of nutrient loading in forested and urbanized coastal streams

As part of a larger investigation of the effects of coastal urbanization on estuaries, stream nutrient loading was examined over a range of hydrologic and seasonal conditions for an urbanized and a forested watershed (11 ha versus 37 ha). Despite the smaller size, the urbanized stream produced 72% ...

Open space through stormwater management: Helping to structure growth on the urban fringe

This article advocates a holistic approach that views stormwater as a vital part of the hydrologic cycle involving management practices to insure infiltration, control runoff pollution, reduce thermal impacts and control peak flows. Management practices for this kind of control put the landscape to ...

Fire storm '91 case study

 

Impact of suburbanization on ground water quality and denitrification in coastal aquifer sediments

The South Carolina coastal plain is currently facing rapid population growth and suburbanization. Suburbanization brings the potential for surface and ground water contamination from the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which can render water toxic to humans and fish, and lead to eutrophication. ...

Human impact on regional groundwater composition through intervention in natural flow patterns and changes in land use

The relations between groundwater composition, land use, soil conditions and flow patterns on a regional scale are studied for the Gooi and Vechtstreek area in the Netherlands. This densely populated area consists of a glacier-created ridge with dry sand soils bordered by the Vecht and Eem River ...

High intensity prescribed fire to maintain spartina marsh at the urban-wildland interface

The Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF) is using high intensity fire to perpetuate fresh-water marsh on Sanibel Island. Shrubs are invading the marsh because of the decreased hydroperiod. A policy of fire exclusion was followed until 1971 when a destructive wildfire occurred during an ...

Urban hydrology for small watersheds

This technical release analyzes the effects of urbanization in a watershed on hydraulic and hydrologic parameters and presents methods of estimating runoff volume and peak rates of discharge. Obtaining basic data on runoff volume and peak rates of discharge is difficult because conditions are ...

Urban growth and land-use conflicts: The case study of New Bombay

The objective of this study is to capture the actual process of land-use change on rural-urban fringe areas through a case study of land-use conflicts on the edge of a large metropolitan city in India. The setting for the study is the New Bombay region of Maharashtra. New Bombay is a new city being ...

Stormwater and the clean water act: Municipal separate storm sewers in the moratorium

Urban stormwater and related pollutant sources have been shown to be major sources of water quality impairment. Section 402(p)(6) of the Clean Water Act requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to identify additional stormwater sources to be regulated to protect water quality under Phase ...

Multicriterion stormwater management methods

Both theory and experience indicate that, while detention basins designed to control peak discharge are effective in controlling peak rate s the basins are ineffective in controlling the degradation of erodible channels downstream of the basin. The increase in runoff volumes that accompanies land ...

What will the wildlands be like in the year 2000: Future perfect or future imperfect?

Profound changes have taken place in the western wildlands during the 20th century that will have great impact on land management policy and operations. Wildlands are being developed. Reduction of fire has altered plant species relationships in terms of dominance and density. The number of ...

Wetland networks for stormwater management in subtropical urban watersheds

A quantitative method suitable for planning wetland stormwater treatment at the regional, multibasin scale was developed based on simple zero order kinetics (uptake rates) and average nutrient loading conditions. The method was applied to urbanized watersheds south of Miami, FL and yielded a ...

Watershed planning and program integration

Since passage of the Clean Water Act, federal, state, and local governments together with the private sector have spent billions of dollars attempting to meet the act's goals of restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters. While great progress ...

Water and the city

In this chapter, some of the important topics relating to the occurrence and use of water in the city are presented. The first section discusses how man has altered the hydrologic cycle in the city, including facets of its flood hydrology, sediment production, changes in water quality, water ...

Valuing the social and economic impacts of fire at the urban-wildland interface: A statistical summary of survey responses

This document summarizes survey responses from a cooperative research project between the USDA Forest Service North Central Experiment Station and Michigan State University's Department of Forestry titled "Valuing the social and economic impacts of fire at the urban-wildland interface".This summary ...

Unshaping growth

 

Uncertainty analysis of BMP effectiveness for controlling nitrogen from urban nonpoint sources

The effectiveness of urban Best Management Practices (BMPs) in achieving the No-Net-Increase Policy (NNIP), a policy designed to limit nonpoint nitrogen loading to Long Island Sound (LIS), is analyzed. A unit loading model is used to simulate annual nitrogen exported from the Norwalk River ...

Tree mortality 6 years after burning a thinned Quercus Chrysolepis stand

Managers do not currently use prescribed fire in stands of canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis Liebm.) because it is highly susceptible to fire injury. A preliminary study investigating the effects of prescribed burning on this species was initiated on the San Bernardino National Forest in ...

Some hydrologic effects of urbanization in Catalan rivers

Studies of the yearly discharge of rivers draining the Catalan Coast, before and after an increase in urbanization within their watersheds, show marked changes in total runoff, peak discharges and lag times between rainfall and runoff: The cumulative curve of annual precipitation shows a steady ...

Site planning from a watershed perspective

The site planning review process involves consideration of the impacts on water resources that can result from the proposed activity, Including changes In water quality and quantity. These changes can affect areas immediately adjacent to the site, as well as distant areas of the watershed. ...

Septic system efficiency: Parallel and serial methods for distributing effluent

Parallel and serial methods of distributing septic tank effluent were compared using representative soil columns. Effluent was applied to each column for a period of 63 weeks. Weekly samples of renovated effluent were evaluated for volume, COD, nitrogen, phosphorus and fecal coliform content ...

The Phison River plume: Coastal eutrophication in response to changes in land use and water management in the watershed

Human impact on the coastal zone is mainly exerted through riverine nutrient delivery, dependent on land use and management of the watershed. The link between human activity and coastal eutrophication is not direct, however, because of the complexity of the processes involved in the retention or ...

The importance of imperviousness

In this article a unifying theme is proposed based on a physically defined unit-imperviousness. Imperviousness here is defined as the sum of roads, parking lots, sidewalks, rooftops, and other impermeable surfaces of the urban landscape. This variable can be easily measured at all scales of ...

Urban watershed ecological risk assessment using GIS: A case study of the Brunette River watershed in British Columbia, Canada

Urbanization has a dramatic impact on the health of local streams. The complexity of the many stressors, pathways and ecosystem functions at risk presents a serious challenge to traditional scientific and management approaches. To overcome this complexity, this study developed a general framework ...

Urban planning criteria for non-point source water pollution control

The examination of urban storm runoff and control alternatives has largely been made with assumptions regarding a single aspect of the urban water quality problem with respect to non-point sources. The research effort described in this paper couples urban storm runoff quality and control ...

Possible effects of residential development on stream flow, riparian plant communities, and fisheries on small mountain streams in central Arizona

Increased residential development along small mountain streams within pine forests in central Arizona has surged in the last 20 years and presents a potential threat to riparian plant communities on these small mountain streams because it can alter the nature of stream flow from perennial to ...

Evidence that local land use practices influence regional climate, vegetation, and stream flow patterns in adjacent natural areas

We present evidence that land use practices in the plains of Colorado influence regional climate and vegetation in adjacent natural areas in the Rocky Mountains in predictable ways. Mesoscale climate model simulations using the Colorado State University Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) ...

Effects of suburbanization upon snowmelt runoff

The influence of suburbanization upon runoff response to snowmelt and rain-on-snow inputs was examined for a small drainage basin in south-central Ontario. Modification of more than 50% of the basin area over a 14 year period led to a six-fold increase in the spring quick flow response ratio and an ...

Effects of improved sewage effluent management and urbanization on fish associations of Toronto streams

Data on fish associations and on water quality collected for a variety of purposes since the 1940s were used to test whether improvements in sewage treatment in and near Toronto, Ontario, had led to improvements in the ecological quality of the previously stressed stream reaches. The fish ...

Detection of changes in stream flow and floods resulting from climate fluctuations and land use-drainage changes

Detection of effects of changing climate on the hydrologic responses of rivers can be further complicated by changes in land use, drainage, and water use. To discern effects of human-caused changes in a basin and those due to precipitation over time, a comparison was made of annual mean flows and ...

Design of an urban, ground-water-dominated wetland

In the Barney Circle wetland in southeast Washington DC, a proposed site for wetland enhancement and creation, ground water supplied over 80% of the flow into the wetland from 25 March to 17 August 1994. In most months, the primary outflow from the wetland occurred as ground-water flow, but in ...

Are recent watershed disturbances associated with temporal and spatial changes in water quality of Lake George, New York, USA

Lake George, a mesooligotrophic lake, is a historically important recreational site in northeastern New York, USA. A preliminary analysis of the data, collected during 1980-1990, suggested that the indicators of primary productivity have increased, particularly in the southern basin of the lake. ...

Land use change and impacts on the San Francisco estuary: A regional assessment with national policy implications

The nation's estuaries are at risk of further deterioration from land use change and intensification. These risks include direct impacts on wetland habitats and stream environments and indirect impacts from nonpoint source pollutant loading. This article reports on the methods, findings, and policy ...

Land development provisions to protect Georgia water quality

This report outlines the types of provisions that could be modified in or added to local development regulations that could improve runoff quality. "Runoff quality" as used in this report includes the quantity of runoff during storms, its constituents, and all of its direct and indirect effects on ...

Integrated planning for wetland restoration and mitigation

A Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) is now being developed by resource agencies, local governments, and interested citizens to address this issue. Two goals of the SAMP are to ensure that the performance of wetland functions and their societal values continue to be equal to or greater than those ...

Influences of watershed land use on habitat quality and biotic integrity in Wisconsin streams

We analyzed relationships between watershed land use and habitat quality, and between watershed land use and biotic integrity for 134 sites on 103 streams located throughout Wisconsin. Habitat quality and index of biotic integrity (1131) scores were significantly positively correlated with the ...

Pennsylvania's wetlands: Urbanization and watercourse modification

Regulation of Pennsylvania's wetlands has been complicated by their diversity and wide geographic distribution. Section 404 of the Clean Water Act only partially protects these wetlands from the effects of urbanization because it regulates neither dredging or the discharge of waste materials into ...

On-site sewage disposal: The influence of system density on water quality

Population density determines the effluent load per unit land area and the concentration of contaminants in groundwater. Numerous studies employing groundwater monitoring and modeling have demonstrated a correlation between water contamination and on-site sewage disposal density. A survey of ...

Nitrogen-stable isotope signatures in estuarine food webs: A record of increasing urbanization in coastal watersheds

Nutrient enrichment as a result of anthropogenic activity concentrated along the land-sea margin is increasing eutrophication of near-shore waters across the globe. Management of eutrophication in the coastal zone has been hampered by the lack of a direct method to trace nitrogen sources from land ...

Nitrogen and phosphorus in surface waters of the upper Colorado River basin

As part of a basin wide water-quality study, nitrogen and phosphorus data for the Upper Colorado River Basin from the Colorado-Utah State line to the Continental Divide were analyzed for spatial distributions, concentrations associated with various land uses, and temporal trends. Nitrogen and ...

Nitrate-nitrogen losses to groundwater from rural and suburban land uses

Nitrate-nitrogen (nitrate-N) losses to groundwater from septic systems, forests, home lawns, and urea- and manure fertilized silage corn were quantified and compared during a 2-year study. The septic system and all silage corn treatments had annual flow weighted concentrations of nitrate-N in ...

Growth management to protect groundwater

Zoning is the most useful groundwater management tool available to local governments. It is also a useful tool in managing growth, and some planners and elected officials have coupled growth management and groundwater protection as a way of (1) ensuring the orderly provision of services, (2) easing ...

Correlation of measures of ambient toxicity and fish community diversity in Chesapeake Bay, USA, tributaries-urbanizing watersheds

This study was performed to evaluate ambient toxicity conditions in Chesapeake Bay tidal tributaries whose watersheds are impacted by urban development and to further evaluate an existing toxicological risk ranking model. A battery of water-column and sediment bioassays were employed with animals ...

Conservation of brooks in small watersheds: A case for planning

Nature conservation is under stress in The Netherlands because of intensive land use practice and related water use, even on the fringe of natural areas. In general, integration of nature conservation and other land uses is a recent objective in Dutch planning. The relationship between landscape ...

A practical method for estimating the impact of land use change on surface runoff, groundwater recharge and wetland hydrology

Environmental scientists and local planners need a way to estimate initially the impacts of land-use change on groundwater recharge, water supply and wetland hydrology. Using a core component of more complex models, a simple spreadsheet analysis can estimate the change in runoff and recharge from ...

A long-term record of human impacts on an urban ecosystem in the sediments of Toolonlahti Bay in Helsinki, Finland

Ecological impacts of urbanization are receiving increasing scientific attention, yet few data sets permit long-term effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to be assessed. Toolonlahti Bay, in the center of Helsinki, Finland, provided on opportunity to characterize recent human impacts ...

Impacts of growth in resource use and human population on the Nechako River: A major tributary of the Fraser River, British Columbia, Canada

Hydroelectric development, forest exploitation, agricultural land use and related human population numbers have increased rapidly during the last 40 years, in the basin of the Nechako River, a major tributary system of the Fraser River. The Kemano project of the Aluminum Company of Canada Ltd. ...

Urban Hydrology: Adapting solution strategies to evolutive problems

Urban hydrology practice has evolved a great deal, keeping up with the evolution of urban problems. Thus, professional engineers have had to keep up with this evolution, in order to understand the effects of urbanization on the hydrological behavior of the systems for which they have to recommend ...

The economic value of riparian corridors in corn belt floodplains: A research framework

A new research framework determines the economic value of riparian corridors in floodplains of the agricultural Midwest. Market mechanisms can fail to account for many positive attributes of riparian wetland ecosystems. Individual farmers frequently make socially inappropriate decisions regarding ...

The cumulative effect of wetlands on stream water quality and quantity: A landscape approach

A method was developed to evaluate the cumulative effect of wetland mosaics in the landscape on stream water quality and quantity in the nine-county region surrounding Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. A Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to record and measure 33 watershed variables ...

Taking advantage of stormwater control basins in urban landscapes

It is possible to mold stormwater basins into integrated components of the urban landscape in ways that provide aesthetic, recreational, maintenance, economic, and ecological values. When used positively, stormwater basins can contribute to the human and natural environment. They can be sculpted, ...

Surface water quality in the border area between El Paso and the Gulf of Mexico

The Rio Grande was established as part of the United States-Mexican Boundary in 1848. Since that time a number of commissions and agencies at local, state, national, and international levels in both countries have conducted surveys and research programs, undertaken large scale projects, and created ...

Modeling the effects of land use change on the water temperature in unregulated urban streams

Streams, in their natural state, are typically diverse and biologically productive environments. Streams subject to urbanization often experience degradation brought about by the cumulative effects of flow alteration, unsanitary discharge and channelization. One of the water quality parameters ...

Local land use planning for rural groundwater protection in Vermont and northern New York

An exploratory survey was conducted of land use planning for rural groundwater protection in 41 towns in Vermont and northern New York. Most communities have experienced contamination and/or supply problems but lack the information necessary to take action to prevent problems in the future. Federal ...

Landscape conservation in a forested wetland watershed: Can we manage cumulative impacts?

This article addresses general issues in environmental. planning related to the cumulative impacts of human activities on the environment. We focus specifically on wetlands, although the problem is more general, and the issues addressed and methods discussed have broad application. To set the ...

Wetland degradation and loss in the rapidly urbanizing area of Portland, Oregon

An inventory was conducted of small (<_ 2 ha) freshwater wetlands composed of some combination of open water and emergent marsh in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon to (1) document changes in the wetland resource since the National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) was conducted (1981/1982 aerial ...

Water in the urban environment: Effects of urban development on floods in Northern Virginia

Graphical and mathematical relations are presented to estimate the flood-peak magnitudes having recurrence intervals ranging up to 100 years for drainage basins with various degrees of urban or suburban development. Five independent variables are required for use of the relations. They are the ...

Urbanization of a watershed and historical changes in a stream fish assemblage

During recent decades, the Tuckahoe Creek (Virginia) watershed has been altered by human activities, including road and bridge construction, commercial and residential development, and riparian losses. We used historical (1958) and recent (1990) data to evaluate the hypothesis that long-term, ...

America's wetlands

Reading this booklet will give you a better understanding of the rich variety of wetlands, their importance, how they are threatened, and what can be done to conserve them for future generations.

Revitalization of a north central Texas river, as indicated by benthic macroinvertebrate communities

Macrobenthic communities were surveyed in 1987-88 as part of a comprehensive study of fish kills and water quality in the upper Trinity River. The purpose was to characterize macrobenthic integrity in relation to ambient and storm-associated water quality and other environmental factors. No ...

The relationships among man's activities in watersheds and estuaries: A model of runoff effects on patterns of estuarine community metabolism

Activities of man in rivers and their watersheds have altered enormously the timing, magnitude, and nature of inputs of materials to estuaries. Despite an awareness of large-scale, long-term changes in river-estuarine watersheds, we do not fully understand the consequences to estuarine ecosystems ...

Research plan for Microbial pathogens and disinfection by-products in drinking water

This document describes the research needed to support EPA's development of drinking water regulations for community systems concerning disinfectants, disinfection by-products (DBPs) and microbial pathogens. It does not specifically address the need of non-community systems; however, much of the ...

Urban stormwater infiltration: Purposes implementation, and results

One promising approach to solving the stormwater problem is to use on-site soil as a mediator of stormwater flows and quality. Although stormwater infiltration has been practiced in some urban areas in the United States for more than half a century, research in the last five years has vastly ...

Racial differences in the household composition of elders by age, gender, and area of residence

Using census data and an innovative technique for describing the composition of households from the perspective of elders, this research provides a more detailed description of race differences in living arrangements of older persons than has previously existed. In addition, cross tabulations of ...

Protecting the nation's wetlands, oceans, and watersheds: an overview of programs and activities

 

Polices to control urban sprawl: Planning regulations or changes in the 'rules of the game'?

Urban sprawl, fuelled by powerful market forces, is unlikely to be controlled by macro-scale regional plans or by comprehensive reforms of the local government map. This paper emphasizes two mechanisms that determine the `rules of the game' of local development and public regulation of urban ...

Planning of urban best management practices

A "user-friendly" computer program has been developed for application in personal computers for preliminary design, evaluation, and cost effectiveness analysis of various best management practice (BMP) measures to control stormwater quantity and quality. The algorithms utilize the SCS TR-55 method ...