Research Goals and Objectives
The ultimate goal of this research is the development of an easy-to-use classification system for gauging watershed stream health in terms of refined biocriteria, stressor diagnosis, and geomorphology. The system will be a sophisticated, user-friendly, and adaptable tool for helping water quality managers make more refined decisions about water resources. The analyses will add to the existing body of knowledge about linkages between landscape features and biological assemblages, and serve as a template for applications in other ecoregions.
The specific objectives of our proposal are to

1) Develop a watershed classification system to explain variation in reference biological assemblages and condition in wadeable streams of the Western Allegheny Plateau (WAP) ecoregion in terms of mapped land use and geologic and geomorphic factors.

2) Develop refined biological criteria (fish and macroinvertebrates) from these reference sites for each biologically meaningful classification unit and, based on these, identify impaired stations in the WAP ecoregion.

3) Develop and test a model to predict habitat quality in the WAP ecoregion from geomorphic attributes; verify the model’s usefulness against the reference sites used in the stream classification analyses.

) Identify major stressors and their threshold levels (in terms of measurable factors such as percent and type of land use) in each classification unit by applying post hoc analysis to a large existing dataset of reference and impaired sites with exploratory and verification subsets.

5) Demonstrate the classification system, application of refined biocriteria, and stressor diagnosis methodology on two watersheds in the WAP ecoregion that represent the two major stressor categories in this region (mining and other nonpoint impacts). Apply the geomorphic model to compare expected habitat conditions at sites identified as habitat-impaired from existing data.

6) Use multiple approaches such as workshops, watershed summaries, and a Web site to 1) help water resource managers in the WAP integrate the results of this research into their existing programs and 2) make the application methods available to parties in regions beyond the WAP and Ohio.