United States Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development National Exposure Research Laboratory Research Abstract Government Performance Results Act (GPRA) Goal #4 Annual Performance Measure #43 Significant Research Findings: Technical Outreach for New Soil and Landform Metrics for Use in Innovative Landscape Indicator Development Scientific Assessing current ecological conditions over very large scales and predicting Problem and future conditions are becoming very important to resource management decision Policy Issues makers. Landscape ecology provides the theory behind these assessments while geographic information systems (GIS) supply the tools to implement them. A comprehensive GIS-based procedure for computing soil erosion and sediment delivery metrics has been delivered in the report, Automated GIS Watershed Analysis Tools of RUSLE SEDMOD Soil Erosion and Sedimentation Modeling. Using soil map unit, land cover, elevation, and other national geographic data sets, this suite of new computer programs estimates soil erosion rate based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) model and the sediment delivery rate based on the Spatially Explicit Delivery Model (SEDMOD). The input data sets that make these computations feasible for the conterminous United States represent an important result of this work and also are provided. Finally, methods for computing new landform metrics currently being tested for applicability and usefulness also are provided. This will allow further evaluation of their suitability in landscape analysis. These new metrics include susceptibility to landslides, mass wasting based on slope morphology, topographic position indices for an entire watershed and the stream zone, and the slope profile and planform curvatures. This research involves the development and computation of landscape metrics and other useful indicators of broad-scale environmental condition. Part of this research is to investigate metrics that show potential for quantitatively and qualitatively describing soil and landform characteristics within a landscape setting using GIS software. As a result of these investigations, a comprehensive procedure for computing soil erosion and sediment delivery metrics has been developed which utilizes a suite of automated scripts and a pair of processing-intensive executable programs operating on a personal computer platform. The computing algorithms are primarily rooted in the technical literature of the RUSLE soil erosion modeling framework and the SEDMOD sedimentation framework. The results are readily associated with other landscape metrics generated by the ATtlLA and PatchAnalyst extensions to provide a comprehensive basis for conducting ecological assessments at landscape scales. Research Approach Results and The SEDMOD package represents a significant improvement over past approaches Impact in computing erosion and sedimentation estimates for large regions, as well as providing useful nationwide data sets and new landscape metrics. We now intend ------- to provide these methods and supporting data to EPA scientists, especially in the EPA Regions, by supplying copies to members of the EPA GIS Working Group. We anticipate this distribution will increase the applications of these types of metrics. This will expand our list of case studies, enhance our examples, further test the software package, and allow us to make progress toward releasing this software to the public for general use. Ultimately, this will lead to improved estimates for soil loss and sedimentation, important to water quality assessments such as the Total Maximum Daily Load process. The development and research was done in collaboration with the U.S. EPA Regions 8, 9, and 10, the Office of Research and Development, the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory, Western Ecology Division, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Exposure Research Laboratory, Environmental Sciences Division, Landscape Ecology Branch. The tool is currently an internal EPA report and it includes a description of the metric development process, descriptions of the metrics, a User's Guide, the software, and input data sets on a CD. Future Research Additional metrics and/or models will be added in the future and the report and software will be cleared for external use. Contacts for Questions and inquiries can be directed to: Additional Information Daniel T. Heggem U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development National Exposure Research Laboratory 944 E. Harmon Ave. Las Vegas, NV 89119 Phone: 702/798-2278 E-mail: heggem.daniel@epa.gov or Ann M. Pitchford U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development National Exposure Research Laboratory 944 E. Harmon Ave. Las Vegas, NV 89119 Phone: 702/798-2366 E-mail: pitchford.ann@epa.gov Funding for this project was through the U.S. EPA's Office of Research and Development, National Exposure Research Laboratory, and the work was conducted by the Environmental Sciences Division and contract #68-D-00-267. Research Collaboration and Research Products ------- |