Watersheds at Risk to Increased Impervious Surface Cover in the Conterminous United States
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 14, Issue 4
Abstract
In this paper, we estimated impervious surface from United States census housing density data sets for the conterminous United States to examine the distribution and extent of impaired watersheds, and to estimate the risk to watersheds from development in the near future. We used regression tree methods to relate estimates of current housing density to the 2001 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) percent urban imperviousness. As of 2000, we estimate of impervious surface (IS) cover across the United States (about 9.6% lower than the NLCD). We estimate that IS cover will expand to by 2030. About 7% of eight-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) watersheds (3.6% of the conterminous United States) were stressed or degraded ( IS) in 2000, and we estimated that this will increase to nearly double to 8.5% of watersheds by 2030 (6.3% of area). We explored the subtle differences of fine-grain pattern for different urban land use types by comparing our national estimates of IS to those developed for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We also found important nonlinear affects of watershed scale and aggregation, whereby estimates of IS could differ by roughly ten-fold.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by the US Environmental Protection Agency Global Change Research group under GSA Contract No. UNSPECIFIEDGS-10F-0124J (to Theobald), an EPA STAR grant (Grant No. UNSPECIFIEDR82868401 to Goetz), and a NASA Applied Sciences Program grant on Ecological Condition of United States National Parks (to Theobald and Goetz). The views expressed in this paper are those of the writers and not the funding agencies. The writers thank C. Elvidge and L. Exum for sharing data sets used for validation, and the helpful comments from the reviewers that improved this paper. S.G. acknowledges the assistance of M. Sun and C. Jantz with processing data sets and graphics.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 14 • Issue 4 • April 2009
Pages: 362 - 368
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Mar 31, 2008
Accepted: Jun 9, 2008
Published online: Apr 1, 2009
Published in print: Apr 2009
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