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Water quality continues to be a leading environmental concern for waterways of the United States thirty years after the passage of the Clean Water Act. One such area is the headwaters of the Sugar Creek watershed in Wayne County, Ohio, which are severely impaired due to nutrient loading, sedimentation, and riparian habitat loss. As land use management affects water quality, specific landscape characteristics within the headwaters of the watershed were studied to determine their relationship with water quality. Landsat TM imagery was classified to create a current land use/ land cover map of the headwaters of the Sugar Creek watershed. Additional physical landscape characteristics (soil drainage and stream density) were determined using existing geo-referenced data in ArcGIS. Land use and physical landscape characteristics were related to water quality data for the headwaters using redundancy analyses. Individual water quality nutrients related differently to land use and physical characteristics of the watershed. Trends observed include a strong positive relationship between nitrate-nitrogen levels and pasture and hay, as well as a strong positive relationship between total solids and small stream density.Riparian areas have been shown been shown to affect water quality and need to be restored to the headwaters of the Sugar Creek watershed to improve water quality and habitat. As successful ecological restoration should emulate the conditions of a natural, undisturbed ecosystem, riparian areas within an old-growth forest in north-central Ohio were studied to serve as a reference ecosystem for the Western Glaciated Allegheny Plateau Ecoregion. Spring and summer ground-flora structure, composition, and distribution along riparian landforms were studied to describe a suite of reference plant community conditions. The results of these analyses suggest that while species richness does not differ among landforms, species composition and structure differ between landforms during both the spring and summer seasons. Information from these studies can be implemented in water quality improvement plans for the headwaters of the Sugar Creek watershed. |
