20200428_Land use and land cover influence on water quality in the last free-flowing river draining the western Sierra Nevada, California 

 

1. Title, Journal, and Authors

Title: Land use and land cover influence on water quality in the last free-flowing river draining the western Sierra Nevada, California

Journal: Journal of Hydrology

Authors: Dylan S. Ahearna,*, Richard W. Sheibleya, Randy A. Dahlgrena, Micheal Andersonb, Joshua Johnsonc, Kenneth W. Tated

aDepartment of Land, Air, Water, Resources, University of California

bCivil and Environmental Engineering, University of California

cDepartment of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California

dDepartment of Agronomy and Range Science, University of California

 

2. Summary

This paper was written to analyze the correlation between LULC (Land Use and Land Cover) and the water qualities of the upper and lower watershed during average and dry water years. Each watershed was investigated by hydrodynamic models and the relations between LULC and water parameters were evaluated by statistics models.

 

In the results, TSS was simply affected by %urban and %agriculture, but nitrate showed complex patterns affected by %grassland and %presence of WWTP. The reason why the concentration was high in the dry year was that grassland acted as a nitrate source in the average year, but changed to the nitrate sink when stream crossing in the dry year. In addition, the upper watershed significantly drained DOC and Si that also caused the deterioration of the water quality of the lower watershed.

 

3. Contact

Dae Seong Jeong / Integrated Ph.D. program

 

Environmental Systems Engineering Lab.

School of Environmental Science & Engineering

Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology

1 Oryong-dong Buk-gu Gwangju, 500-712, Korea

 

Phone : +82-10-2003-7860

E-mail : jeongds92@gist.ac.kr