Evaluating the impact of watershed development and climate change on stream ecosystems: A Bayesian network modeling approach.

A continuous-variable Bayesian network (cBN) model is used to link watershed development and climate change to stream ecosystem indicators. A graphical model, reflecting our understanding of the connections between climate change, weather condition, loss of natural land cover, stream flow characteristics, and stream ecosystem indicators is used as the basis for selecting flow metrics for predicting macroinvertebrate-based indicators. Selected flow metrics were then linked to variables representing watershed development and climate change.

Reassessing the relationship between landscape alteration and aquatic ecosystem degradation from a hydrologically sensitive area perspective.

This study applies a novel landscape approach to empirically assess the linkage between terrestrial landscape alteration such as urbanization and aquatic ecosystem degradation from a hydrological sensitive area (HSA) perspective in 141 selected northern New Jersey watersheds. HSAs are hydrological "hotspots" in a watershed that actively contribute to runoff generation and were delineated using a soil topographic index. Land use metrics captured landscape alterations in terms of percentages of varying land uses in these watersheds and their HSAs.

Stream macroinvertebrate response models for bioassessment metrics: addressing the issue of spatial scale.

We developed independent predictive disturbance models for a full regional data set and four individual ecoregions (Full Region vs. Individual Ecoregion models) to evaluate effects of spatial scale on the assessment of human landscape modification, on predicted response of stream biota, and the effect of other possible confounding factors, such as watershed size and elevation, on model performance. We selected macroinvertebrate sampling sites for model development (n = 591) and validation (n = 467) that met strict screening criteria from four proximal ecoregions in the northeastern U.