Massachusetts Project
A heads up view of aquatic ecosystem sustainability: understanding the terrestrial landscape scale impacts of urbanization on aquatic biota
September 2012 - August 2015
Personnel
- Allison Roy, Co-Principal Investigator
- Robert Smith, Principal Investigator
- Elizabeth Brabec, Co-Principal Investigator
- Laura McPherson, Student / Post Doc
- Alison Tenhulzen, Student / Post Doc
- Robert Ryan, Co-Principal Investigator
Participating Agencies
- National Science Foundation/GEO
This work on environmental and societal sustainability has two main objectives: 1) Examine how patterns of stream fish and insect community composition relate to watershed-scale versus landscape-scale land-use patterns. 2) Examine how land-use development scenarios impact the suitability of land acquisition strategies for conserving stream fish and insect communities. Objective 1 takes a multi-scale approach to understanding how land-use patterns relate to stream fish and insect community structure by using existing community data and GIS analysis of land-use patterns. Objective 2 will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how different land acquisition strategies benefit stream fish and insect populations while maintaining economic growth and societal needs. The work will incorporate land-use development models. The results from objective 2 will be transformed into a decision-support system (DSS) developed to aid agency personnel with land acquisition activities.
| Presentations | Presentation Date |
|---|---|
| Smith, R.F. and A.H. Roy. 2014. How watershed and landscape land use are related should guide investigations of dispersal by stream biota in urbanizing landscapes. Third Symposium on Urbanization and Stream Ecology, 15-17 May 2014, Portland, Oregon. | May 2014 |
| Smith, R.F. and A.H. Roy. 2014. Landscape and watershed predictors of insect and fish assemblage in Massachusetts streams. Annual Meeting of the New England Association of Environmental Biologists, 26-28 March 2014, Burlington, VT. | March 2014 |
| Smith, R.F. and A.H. Roy. 2014. Thinking outside the shed: Examining landscape characteristics as part of management strategies for sustaining stream ecosystems. Joint Aquatic Sciences Meeting, 18-22 May 2014, Portland, OR. | May 2014 |
| Roy, A.H. and R.F. Smith. 2014. Investigating impacts of landscape development on stream fish and insect dispersal. Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society, 17-21 August 2014, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. | August 2014 |
| Smith, R.F. and A.H. Roy. 2015. The effect of dispersal barriers on stream fish and insect assemblages in urban landscapes. Annual Meeting of the Society for Freshwater Science, 17-21 May 2015, Milwaukee, WI. | May 2015 |
| Smith, R.F., A.H. Roy, and R.L. Ryan. 2015. Are conservation lands good for streams? Assessing the spatial relationships of conservation lands to stream ecosystems in Massachusetts. New England Association of Environmental Biologists, 18-20 2015, Bartlett, NH. | March 2015 |
| Smith, R.F., G.C. Gunderson, and A.H. Roy. 2015. Catchment land use and dispersal barriers affect fish and insect assemblage composition in urban streams. Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, 9-14, August 2015, Baltimore, MD | August 2015 |