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1999 Progress Report: Spatial Patterns and Biodiversity
EPA Grant Number: R825433C055Subproject: this is subproject number 055 , established and managed by the Center Director under grant R825433
(EPA does not fund or establish subprojects; EPA awards and manages the overall grant for this center).
Center: EERC - Center for Ecological Health Research (Cal Davis)
Center Director: Rolston, Dennis E.
Title: Spatial Patterns and Biodiversity
Investigators: Quinn, James , Jassby, Alan D. , Moyle, Peter
Institution: University of California - Davis
EPA Project Officer: Levinson, Barbara
Project Period: October 1, 1996 through September 30, 2000
Project Period Covered by this Report: October 1, 1998 through September 30, 1999
RFA: Exploratory Environmental Research Centers (1992)
Research Category: Center for Ecological Health Research , Targeted Research
Description:
Objective:To manage a large variety of GIS and biodiversity databases. This allows for a number of unique analyses that can be closely coupled with other modeling and ecosystem projects to help determine such things as species composition, habitat availability, population estimates, risks of toxic substances to wildlife, and non-point source loading to rivers.
Progress Summary:The Core's computer center, created de novo at the beginning of the grant, has developed into a statewide center for GIS and environmental database design and dissemination. Work done in the core has proven of considerable value to a number of agencies, and the Core has attracted over 40 additional grants and contracts to extend Center work, including nine from EPA Region IX. In a cooperative agreement with the California EPA, we are developing a database of known toxic effects of chemical stressors on California vertebrate species. In addition, the Center houses and provides Internet access to biodiversity data covering a wide variety of protected lands, including state and national parks, UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, and Nature Conservancy preserves, and is taking the lead on developing Department of the Interior strategies for international data exchange on non-indigenous species.
Geographic Information System (GIS). A sophisticated GIS facility, supporting 11 graduate students, with 8 GIS-specialist staff, about 20 ArcInfo workstations, and a variety of peripheral equipment, is now well established. The facility has about 120 statewide GIS layers of environmental themes, especially land forms, land use, biodiversity and water quality, mostly online, and has become the most active California university GIS program in interagency GIS development (under the aegis of the California Biodiversity Council, the California Geographic Information Association, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure) . The Center is the major developer and repository in the state for the National Hydrography Database (the successor to the EPA River Reach Files), the EPA Waterbody system, and other systems used by EPA and collaborating state agencies in managing water quality, water supply, biodiversity issues, and ecological risk assessment. Many of the techniques developed by the Center and its collaborators in the Department of Fish and Game have now been adopted for national implementation.
Clean Water Act Reports. The Center recently completed a project with EPA Region IX to update, modernize, and disseminate the water body reports required under Sections 303(d) and 305(b) of the Clean Water Act for California. We installed the new ArcView-based system, Geo-WBS, in the Regional Water Quality Control Boards in March, and trained analysts to use the GIS to evaluate beneficial uses, sources of impairment, and TMDL issues. The State Water Board is now using the software to prepare Clean Water Act 303(d) (non-point source pollution) reports, and the results will be on-line for professional and public access. We now have new cooperative programs with Region 9, the California Department of Forestry, the California Department of Transportation and the SWRCB to make their non-point-source and stormwater assessment data interoperable.
World Wide Web. The Core facility has established a World Wide Web server to disseminate data and model results to collaborators, managers, and the general public. The Internet activities have been incorporated into a number of electronic data access initiatives, including CERES in California, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure and the Government Information Locator Service at the national level, and the Smithsonian and the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere program internationally.
Future Activities:As a result of the variety of GIS and biodiversity databases managed by the Core, we have the ability to do a number of unique analyses, which will be closely coupled with and complementary to the other Core models and the ecosystem projects.
· While occurrences of both indicator taxa and rare and endangered species are increasingly critical to environmental policy, most areas have not been adequately surveyed to document occurrences and populations of important species. As a result, Wildlife Habitat Relations (WHR) and Gap Analysis models are increasingly being used to infer the presence of species of concern on at least 90% of the landscape where biological surveys are lacking or inadequate. We have submitted a manuscript testing these predictions against either existing data on species in protected areas, or with respect to landscape characteristics, including the size or degree of isolation of "patches" of suitable habitat for rare species. Standard models prove very useful for large conservation areas and "charismatic" taxa such as large mammals and birds, and are in need of revision for urban fringe, riparian, and patchy habitats, and for "less popular" taxa.
· In California, Wildlife Habitat Relations, Gap Analysis, and comparable models have only been developed and tested for terrestrial vertebrates. We believe we can develop formal models following the work of Moyle, Ellison, and colleagues, which will accurately predict the species composition and critical habitats for fish, amphibians, and some indicator invertebrates, in rivers and streams that have not been surveyed. Our growing databases of aquatic and riparian species occurrences (some 220,000 records to date) will allow us to both estimate the parameters of an "aquatic WHR" model and to test its accuracy. (Preliminary studies in three northern California watersheds suggest that the accuracy of pilot analyses exceeds 80%). We have just received funding to extensively test the results of the first generation of fish occurrence models in the Cosumnes River Watershed (the last major undammed river draining the Sierra Nevada into San Francisco Bay.)
· Invasive species are increasingly being recognized as threats to biodiversity and ecosystem processes. The Core is coordinating data issues in California on the distributions of invasive plants and non-native fish. We have also just begun a partnership with the Department of Interior to develop strategies for assessing invasive species issues in the Western Hemisphere under the Inter-Americas Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN), an initiative begun under the Summit of the Americas, and are awaiting World Bank funds to develop a prototype for a data system. We recently organized an international workshop to plan this initiative at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and will conduct two follow-up international workshops in the winter of 2000.
· We recently completed a second phase of a cooperative study with CalEPA to develop a database and management models for risk analyses of the effects of toxic substances on California wildlife population responses. These have the potential to couple the exposure and effects data with the GIS-based distributional data described above, potentially allowing managers to identify risk elements and potential wildlife responses at particular sites (using the biodiversity databases and models) or for particular releases.
· Understanding the impact of land use patterns on runoff has been a major uncertainty in constructing mass balance analyses at the watershed level for a variety of important waterborne constituents, including nitrogen, some pesticides and metals, and sediment load. These, in turn, are thought to be the major causes (other than dams) for declines in anadromous fish -- declines which have driven much of the habitat conservation planning efforts and TMDL (total maximum daily load) actions in Northern California. We are working with investigators in other projects (Mount, Schladow, Fogg) to integrate our spatial data with mechanistic models. We have completed a year of field work to test these assessments in two ambitious watershed-scale field tests, one in the Navarro River watershed (north coast, funded by CalTrans) and the other in the Cosumnes watershed (Sierra Nevada and Delta, funded by the Packard Foundation and CALFED). Data analysis for the first seasons is still underway.
These efforts are tightly interwoven with other Center projects. The runoff modeling provides inputs for the toxicological studies in the Clear Lake and Bay-Delta projects. Conversely, the chemical analysis of spatial sources of sediment load in the Clear Lake basin (Project IV.2) permits a refinement of the geography of non-point source inputs into the Sacramento River and Delta system. On another front, biomarker data from several other projects provides the most powerful test of the models. The predicted spatial extent of species effects studied in most of the Center projects can be mapped using the biodiversity GIS layers. Land cover and land forms affect all of the transport processes studied in both the Decision Support and the Fate and Transport Cores, and transport in many cases is essential to predicting species occurrences.
Supplemental Keywords:Ecosystem Protection/Environmental Exposure & Risk, Water, INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION, Scientific Discipline, RFA, ECOSYSTEMS, Water & Watershed, Restoration, Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration, Aquatic Ecosystems & Estuarine Research, Terrestrial Ecosystems, Aquatic Ecosystem, computing technology, Biochemistry, Environmental Microbiology, Fate & Transport, Watersheds, Monitoring/Modeling, ecological impact, contaminant transport models, computer simulation modeling, aquatic, fate and transport, watershed management, watershed restoration, database, computer science, data management, decision support systems, ecological research, ecology assessment models, aquatic modeling, alternative mechanistic models, hydrological transport model, analytical models, material transport, GIS, ambient particle properties, aquatic ecosystems, data analysis, ecosystem assessment, environmental stress, sediment transport, watershed sustainablility, hydrology, modeling, watershed influences, restoration strategies, ecosystem stress, ecological models, biodiversity, habitat, integrated watershed model
Progress and Final Reports:
Original Abstract
2000 Progress Report
Final Report
Main Center Abstract and Reports:
R825433 EERC - Center for Ecological Health Research (Cal Davis)
Subprojects under this Center:
(EPA does not fund or establish subprojects; EPA awards and manages the overall grant for this center).
R825433C001 Potential for Long-Term Degradation of Wetland Water Quality Due to Natural Discharge of Polluted Groundwater
R825433C002 Sacramento River Watershed
R825433C003 Endocrine Disruption in Fish and Birds
R825433C004 Biomarkers of Exposure and Deleterious Effect: A Laboratory and Field Investigation
R825433C005 Fish Developmental Toxicity/Recruitment
R825433C006 Resolving Multiple Stressors by Biochemical Indicator Patterns and their Linkages to Adverse Effects on Benthic Invertebrate Patterns
R825433C007 Environmental Chemistry of Bioavailability in Sediments and Water Column
R825433C008 Reproduction of Birds and mammals in a terrestrial-aquatic interface
R825433C009 Modeling Ecosystems Under Combined Stress
R825433C010 Mercury Uptake by Fish
R825433C011 Clear Lake Watershed
R825433C012 The Role of Fishes as Transporters of Mercury
R825433C013 Wetlands Restoration
R825433C014 Wildlife Bioaccumulation and Effects
R825433C015 Microbiology of Mercury Methylation in Sediments
R825433C016 Hg and Fe Biogeochemistry
R825433C017 Water Motions and Material Transport
R825433C018 Economic Impacts of Multiple Stresses
R825433C019 The History of Anthropogenic Effects
R825433C020 Wetland Restoration
R825433C021 Sierra Nevada Watershed Project
R825433C022 Regional Transport of Air Pollutants and Exposure of Sierra Nevada Forests to Ozone
R825433C023 Biomarkers of Ozone Damage to Sierra Nevada Vegetation
R825433C024 Effects of Air Pollution on Water Quality: Emission of MTBE and Other Pollutants From Motorized Watercraft
R825433C025 Regional Movement of Toxics
R825433C026 Effect of Photochemical Reactions in Fog Drops and Aerosol Particles on the Fate of Atmospheric Chemicals in the Central Valley
R825433C027 Source Load Modeling for Sediment in Mountainous Watersheds
R825433C028 Stress of Increased Sediment Loading on Lake and Stream Function
R825433C029 Watershed Response to Natural and Anthropogenic Stress: Lake Tahoe Nutrient Budget
R825433C030 Mercury Distribution and Cycling in Sierra Nevada Waterbodies
R825433C031 Pre-contact Forest Structure
R825433C032 Identification and distribution of pest complexes in relation to late seral/old growth forest structure in the Lake Tahoe watershed
R825433C033 Subalpine Marsh Plant Communities as Early Indicators of Ecosystem Stress
R825433C034 Regional Hydrogeology and Contaminant Transport in a Sierra Nevada Ecosystem
R825433C035 Border Rivers Watershed
R825433C036 Toxicity Studies
R825433C037 Watershed Assessment
R825433C038 Microbiological Processes in Sediments
R825433C039 Analytical and Biomarkers Core
R825433C040 Organic Analysis
R825433C041 Inorganic Analysis
R825433C042 Immunoassay and Serum Markers
R825433C043 Sensitive Biomarkers to Detect Biochemical Changes Indicating Multiple Stresses Including Chemically Induced Stresses
R825433C044 Molecular, Cellular and Animal Biomarkers of Exposure and Effect
R825433C045 Microbial Community Assays
R825433C046 Cumulative and Integrative Biochemical Indicators
R825433C047 Mercury and Iron Biogeochemistry
R825433C048 Transport and Fate Core
R825433C049 Role of Hydrogeologic Processes in Alpine Ecosystem Health
R825433C050 Regional Hydrologic Modeling With Emphasis on Watershed-Scale Environmental Stresses
R825433C051 Development of Pollutant Fate and Transport Models for Use in Terrestrial Ecosystem Exposure Assessment
R825433C052 Pesticide Transport in Subsurface and Surface Water Systems
R825433C053 Currents in Clear Lake
R825433C054 Data Integration and Decision Support Core
R825433C055 Spatial Patterns and Biodiversity
R825433C056 Modeling Transport in Aquatic Systems
R825433C057 Spatial and Temporal Trends in Water Quality
R825433C058 Time Series Analysis and Modeling Ecological Risk
R825433C059 WWW/Outreach
R825433C060 Economic Effects of Multiple Stresses
R825433C061 Effects of Nutrients on Algal Growth
R825433C062 Nutrient Loading
R825433C063 Subalpine Wetlands as Early Indicators of Ecosystem Stress
R825433C064 Chlorinated Hydrocarbons
R825433C065 Sierra Ozone Studies
R825433C066 Assessment of Multiple Stresses on Soil Microbial Communities
R825433C067 Terrestrial - Agriculture
R825433C069 Molecular Epidemiology Core
R825433C070 Serum Markers of Environmental Stress
R825433C071 Development of Sensitive Biomarkers Based on Chemically Induced Changes in Expressions of Oncogenes
R825433C072 Molecular Monitoring of Microbial Populations
R825433C073 Aquatic - Rivers and Estuaries
R825433C074 Border Rivers - Toxicity Studies