Lutz, David: Dartmouth College (Project Lead)
Project Funding:
2017 - 2020
NRA: 2016 NASA: Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science
Funded by NASA
Abstract:
Human societies rely on lakes and reservoirs for many essential ecosystem services including the supply of drinking water, opportunities for recreation, aesthetic benefits, and habitat for biodiversity. Yet humans also impact the provisioning of these services by altering the landscape within lake catchments. Such changes, for instance the development of built structures and roads, typically result in the loss of natural forest and vegetative cover, an increase in impervious surfaces, and habitat fragmentation all of which increase nutrient loading to lakes and decrease water quality through the promotion of excessive phytoplankton growth. Cyanobacterial blooms, one of the major consequences of such excessive growth, can significantly impede the delivery of environmental benefits because they degrade water quality, clarity, and aesthetics, stifle lake use, and decrease nearby property values. To date, the interacting effects of human and environmental pressures on lake water quality are not holistically understood. This inhibits the ability of stakeholders to manage lakes for resilience, a concern given that lakes are facing growing pressure from both land use and climate change. To address this issue, the overarching goal of this project is to transform the state of knowledge of how demographic and land cover changes within lake catchments interact with regional climate change and thereby impact lake water quality, particularly water clarity and the incidence of cyanobacterial blooms.
We will focus on lakes within primarily forested watersheds in the northeastern United States, particularly those that are subject to ongoing development and major shifts in climate. Our specific objectives are to:
1.Evaluate the interactive effects of human population growth, altered land use and land cover, climate variability, and lake-specific characteristics on lake water quality from 1986-2016, thereby developing predictive models of how lake water quality may change in the future.
2.Develop much-needed tools and models for real-time assessment of cyanobacterial blooms in small-to-moderate-sized lakes using new platforms and technologies including sub-orbital unmanned aerial system-based hyperspectral sensors and crowd-sourced citizen-science data collected using smartphone applications.
Altogether, the proposed research will significantly advance our ability to forecast lake conditions on both an individual basis and across landscapes. Although few studies have evaluated human demography as a driver of catchment change, we will integrate this important discipline to broaden our understanding of lake ecosystems in an interdisciplinary fashion. Furthermore, we will use satellite and sub-orbital remotely sensed data at a variety of spectral and spatial resolutions to quantify changes in land cover, lake temperature, clarity, and algal indicators over time for catchments and water bodies, and thereby will contribute to NASA’s goals of combining remotely sensed and in-lake measurements with observational modeling to provide guidance to natural resource managers. Our proposed project will thus provide crucial guidance for the development and advancement of current and future NASA sensors, particularly in the hyperspectral domain, for effective monitoring and management of the planet’s freshwater resources.
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
