Water Quality Analysis for Selected Streams in Utah and Idaho
CEE 6640 Term Paper
Ruba Mohamed
Introduction
Many
streams in the United States have been deemed impaired by water quality
standards (Petty 2010). The two main contributors to stream impairment are
point and non point sources (Frondorf 2001). In general, point sources (i.e.
wastewater treatment plant and factory discharges) are easy to track and manage
in terms of discharging to national streams. Non-point source discharges (i.e.
runoff from golf course, agricultural and grazing land) are difficult to
specify and control. The main known stream pollutants are nutrients and
sediments which are highly correlated to the topography and the land use of an
area (Walling 2003). Runoffs from golf course, agricultural and grazing lands
contribute to high levels of sediments and nutrients i.e. phosphorous, nitrogen
and organic carbon. Nutrients and sediments are transported to the water body
through surface runoffs from precipitation and snow melt. Depending on the
level of nutrients and sediments in a stream, the dissolved oxygen can vary
significantly causing essential problems to fish and other aquatic organisms
(Weitzman 2008).
The
Cutler Reservoir which located in northern Utah was deemed by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and the State of Utah to be impaired by nutrients and
sediments. Cutler Reservoir receives its water from three main streams i.e.
Bear River, Little Bear River, and Logan River besides a number of small creeks
and tributaries including Spring Creek. It is believed that the main source of
the sediments and nutrients are non-point sources within the rivers watersheds.
The
study utilized ArcGIS to estimate the load of one pollutant (i.e. total
phosphorous) from land-use applications to the main three streams that form the
Cutler Reservoir. The Bear River is sharing watersheds in Utah, Idaho, and
Wyoming; rising in Utah, crossing the states border five times before ending in
the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The Logan River is rising at the Bear River
Mountains in Idaho and ending in Cutler Reservoir. The Little Bear River is
flowing in Utah and ending in the south part of Cutler Reservoir.
Unfortunately, due to the time constraint, I was not able to include the Spring
Creek on this study. The main objective of the project was to obtain the area
of each land-use category associated with each stream’ watershed. Given the
phosphorous loading coefficient of different land-use category from the
literature, the phosphorous loads were found. As part of the study, the streams
length and the watersheds area were identified. The results were used to
compare among the three streams and to estimate the stream that is likely to be
a cause of Cutler Reservoir' impairment.
Data
and Methodology
The
tools for this study were made available through ArcGIS 10 including ArcCatalog
10 and ArcMap 10. The Terrain Analysis using Digital Elevation Models (TauDEM)
version 5 was also used (Tarboton 2010). The TauDEM is a digital elevation
model tool that was developed in Utah State University by Dr. David Tarboton hydrology
research group to analyze the terrain using topography and DEM datasets. The
dataset used in this study includes the 1:250,000-scale Hydrologic Units of the
United States (HUC_12) (USGS 2010a), the national hydrography dataset and the
flowline attribute dataset from the NHDPlus data for Region 16 (NHDPlus 2010),
the shapefiles of the land-use and land-cover datasets from the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS 2010b), and the 1/3 arc second national elevation dataset (NED)
from the USGS seamless server (USGS 2010c).
The
data were imported to ArcGIS and projected to Albers Equal Area Conic and
adjusted to the CGS North American 1983 spatial reference. The required
watersheds and streams were selected from the HUC_12 and nhdflowline feature
classes respectively by using the “select by attribute” from their attribute
tables. Figure (1) shows the three rivers and the HUC_12 watersheds. The NED
and the land-use data which were a multiple datasets were converted from
polygon to raster using the “Conversion Tools” in ArcToolbox. This step
allowed using the “Mosaic” tool in the “Data Management Tools” in ArcToolbox to
merge the adjacent dataset into one entry. To complete the previous step, the
sympology of the “unique values” for each multiple dataset had to be adjusted
to mach. The “Extract by Mask” tool in the “Spatial Analyst tools” in
ArcCatalog was then used to extract the raster cells of the NED and
land-use/land-cover dataset that correspond to the selected watersheds. Figure
(2) shows the land-use mosaic layer including the land-use category legend.
Since
the Logan River and Little Bear River are on the same HUC_12 watershed, the
TauDEM tools were used to delineate each river’ watershed. To do that, the NED
dataset were converted from raster to tiff format using the “Conversion Tools”
in ArcCatalog and used as the input raster for the TauDEM command. Since the
graphical user interface property of the TauDEM does not work for ArcGIS 10 yet,
the TauDEM was run using a command line and a windows command processor
(command prompt) (Figure 3). A number of sequenced output files were produced
by the TauDEM including, pits removal, flow path calculation, contributing area
calculation, stream network delineation, and channel network delineation before
delineating the watershed (Tarboton 2010). Figure (4) shows the Little Bear
River and Logan River watersheds delineated using the TauDEM. The land-use
layer was extracted for each watershed as described above and the attribute
table of each watershed was exported and saved as a text file. The percent of
each land-use category was then calculated using an excel file.
Figure (1): Logan River, Little Bear River, Bear River, and their watersheds
Figure (2): The land-use mosaic layer
Figure (3): The command line and command prompt used to run
the TauDEM commands
Figure (4): The delineated watersheds of the Logan River and
Little Bear River using the TauDEM tools
Results
The
streams, streams length and watersheds area are presented in Table 1. The percent
of each land-use category of each watershed is presented in Table 2.
Table (1): The streams, streams length and watersheds area
|
Stream |
Watershed Area (ac) |
Stream Length (km) |
|
Logan River |
340,128.2 |
84.386 |
|
Little Bear River |
184,807.6 |
203.33 |
|
Bear River |
3,482,177 |
776.02 |
Table (2): The percentage of each land-use type in the three rivers’ watersheds
|
Land-use Type |
Percentage of total land use |
||
|
Logan River |
Little Bear River |
Bear River |
|
|
Residential |
0.41 |
0.48 |
0.38 |
|
Commercial and Services |
0.22 |
0.18 |
0.08 |
|
Industrial |
0.14 |
0.19 |
0.06 |
|
Transportation, communications and services |
0.13 |
0.16 |
0.10 |
|
Mixed urban or built-up land |
0.16 |
0.19 |
0.04 |
|
Other urban or built-up land |
0.14 |
0.24 |
0.05 |
|
Cropland and pasture |
2.36 |
22.28 |
19.89 |
|
Orchards, groves, vineyards, nurseries |
0.28 |
1.46 |
0.00 |
|
Confined feeding operations |
0.08 |
0.66 |
0.00 |
|
Other agricultural land |
0.05 |
0.60 |
0.01 |
|
Herbaceous Rangeland |
5.65 |
5.04 |
0.24 |
|
Shrub-brushland rangeland |
27.64 |
39.46 |
47.76 |
|
Mixed rangeland |
4.00 |
8.57 |
3.79 |
|
Deciduous forest land |
12.38 |
2.93 |
2.79 |
|
Evergreen forest land |
28.70 |
12.72 |
10.83 |
|
Mixed forest land |
17.62 |
4.70 |
9.83 |
|
Lakes |
0.01 |
0.04 |
1.88 |
|
Reservoirs |
0.01 |
0.04 |
0.24 |
|
Forested wetland |
0.01 |
0.02 |
0.13 |
|
Nonforested wetland |
0.01 |
0.03 |
1.34 |
|
Bare exposed rock |
0.01 |
0.00 |
0.02 |
|
Strip mines, quarries and gravel pits |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.00 |
|
Transitional areas |
0.01 |
0.00 |
0.00 |
|
Sandy areas other than beaches |
0.01 |
0.00 |
0.02 |
|
Shrub and brush tundra |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.03 |
|
Herbaceous tundra |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.07 |
|
Strip mines, quarries and gravel pits |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.16 |
|
Transitional areas |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.09 |
|
Mixed tundra |
0.00 |
0.00 |
0.12 |
Figure (5) is a graphical
representation of Table (2) that shows the percent of the land-use categories
in Logan River, Bear River, and Little Bear River respectively.
Figure (5): The percent
of the land-use categories in a) Logan River, b) Bear River, and c) Little Bear
River
Table
(3) shows a summary of the percentage of the dominant land-use category and
Table (4) shows the literature total phosphorous loading coefficient for a
number of land-use categories. Table (5) shows the areas in acres of the
dominant land-use categories which were calculated by multiplying the count of
the category by the cell area (100*100 m2). It also shows the total
phosphorous load from each category to the stream.
Table (3): A percentage summary of the dominant land-use categories in the three rivers’ watersheds
|
Land-use Type |
Logan River |
Bear River |
Little Bear |
|
Cropland and pasture |
< 3% |
20% |
22% |
|
Different rangeland |
≈ 35% |
≈ 51% |
≈ 55% |
|
Different forest land |
≈ 60% |
≈ 22% |
≈ 20% |
|
Urban, residential, industrial, and commercial |
< 1% |
< 1% |
< 3% |
|
Others |
< 1% |
< 6% |
< 1% |
Table (4): Total phosphorous loading coefficient from different land-use category (Lin 2004)
|
Land-use Category |
Total Phosphorous Loading Rate (lb/ac/yr) |
|
Industrial |
4.77 |
|
Transportation, communications and services |
2.5 |
|
Commercial and Services |
2.05 |
|
Residential |
1.97 |
|
Cropland and pasture |
0.94 |
|
Herbaceous Rangeland |
0.22 |
|
Shrub-brushland rangeland |
0.22 |
|
Forest land |
0.08 |
|
Lakes and reservoirs |
0 |
Table (5): Total phosphorous load from different land-use types
|
|
Logan |
Bear River |
Little Bear River |
|||
|
Land-use Category |
Area (ac) |
Load (lb/yr) |
Area (ac) |
Load (lb/yr) |
Area (ac) |
Load (lb/yr) |
|
Cropland and pasture |
6,721.27 |
6,519.63 |
692,798.28 |
651,230.38 |
35,507.00 |
33,376.18 |
|
Different rangeland |
103,991.8 |
22,878.2 |
1,803,325.77 |
396,731.67 |
82,353.00 |
18,117.62 |
|
Different forest land |
163,697.40 |
13,095.79 |
816,796.76 |
65,343.74 |
31,590.00 |
2,527.19 |
|
Urban, residential, industrial, and commercial |
2,500.71 |
6,263.92 |
21,581.51 |
50,157.02 |
1,567.00 |
4,076.39 |
|
Total Load (lb/yr) |
|
48,757.54 |
|
1,163,462.82 |
|
58,097.38 |
Figure (6) is a graphical representation
of the data in Table (5) which shows the annual total phosphorous load in
pounds for the three rivers from the dominant land-use categories.
Figure (6): The total
phosphorous load in Logan River, Little Bear River, and Bear River from the
dominant land-use categories
Discussion
The
quantity of the total phosphorous load varies significantly with the land-use
category. For Little Bear River and Logan River, the percentage of the
contributing land-use area was calculated using the watersheds delineated using
the TauDEM tools. For Logan River which is the shortest among the three rivers
(Table 1), the dominant land-use categories are forestland and rangeland with ≈60% and 30% ratios
respectively (Tables 2 and 3) and (Figure 5). The annual total
phosphorous load as shown in Table 5 is ≈48,000 pounds, which is less than the loads in
Little Bear River. For Little Bear River, the cropland and pasture are
introduced to the watershed at the downstream (recall Figure 2). This fact
demonstrates that higher total phosphorous loads are entering the river in the
downstream watershed. The annual total phosphorous load for Little Bear River
as shown in Table 5 and Figure 5 is 58,097.38 pounds.
For
the Bear River the percentage of the contributing land-use categories was
calculated using the entire four watersheds that the River flows in i.e. upper
Bear, central Bear, Bear Lake, and middle Bear watersheds. Consequently, the
annual total phosphorous load for the Bear River was over a million pounds
which is clearly was over estimated (Table 5) and (Figure 6). However, the
dominant land-use categories on the upstream watersheds i.e. upper Bear,
central Bear, and Bear Lake watersheds are rangeland and forestland; the
cropland and pasture are also introduced to the river in the downstream
watershed i.e. middle Bear (recall Figure 2). This land-use distribution can
also be an indication that the water quality of the downstream of the Bear
River is lower than the upstream.
Conclusions
From
the previous results, the Logan River is receiving the least total phosphorous
load among the three studied rivers. However, the land-use distribution and characteristics
for the Little Bear River and Bear River watersheds indicate that the rivers
are receiving high loads in the downstream.
It
is important to note that this is study does not include the effects of dams on
the phosphorous chemistry; therefore, the loads founded are not necessarily the
actual loads on the rivers. Moreover, the land-uses/land-cover data do not
include the animal feeding operations which can contribute to big amounts of
load. However, this study could be a good foundation to select the field
sampling locations. Extra studies should focus on dividing the rivers into
reaches to determine the reaches with the highest loads for best management
practices.
References
Frondorf L. (2001): An Investigation of Relationships between Stream Benthic Macroinvertebrates Assemblage Conditions and Their Stressors. M.S. thesis, Biological System Engineering, Virginia Tech, 179.
Lin, J. P. (2004, September). Review of Published Export Coefficient and Mean Concentration (EMC) Data.Retrieved November 28, 2009, from Wetland Regulatory Assistance Program: http://el.erdc.usace.army.mil/elpubs/pdf/tnwrap04-3.pdf
NHDPlus 2010: NHDPlus Data. [http://www.horizon-systems.com/NHDPlus/data.php]
Petty J. T., Fulton J. B., Strager M. P., Merovich Jr G. T., Stiles J. M., and Ziemkiewicz P. F. (2010): Landscape indicators and thresholds of stream ecological impairment in an intensively mined Appalachian watershed. Journal of the North American Benthological Society, 29(4), 1292-1309
Tarboton, D. G. (2010). Terrain Analysis using Digital Elevation Models (TAUDEM), from Utah State University Hydrology Research Group: David Tarboton: [http://hydrology.neng.usu.edu/taudem/]
USGS 2010a: 1:250,000-scale
Hydrologic Units of the United States. [http://water.usgs.gov/lookup/getspatial?huc250k]
USGS 2010b: USGS
DS 240: Enhanced Historical Land-Use and Land-Cover Data Sets of the U.S. Geological
Survey. [http://water.usgs.gov/GIS/dsdl/ds240/index.html]
USGS 2010c: Seamless Data Warehouse
Walling D. E., Owens P. N., Carter J., Leeks G. J. L., Lewis S., Meharg A. A. and Wright J. (2003): Storage of sediment-associated nutrients and contaminants in river channel and floodplain systems. Applied Geochemistry, 18(2), 195-220.
Weitzman J. (2008): Nutrient and Trace Element Contents of Stream Bank Sediments from Big Spring Run and Implications for the Chesapeake Bay. M.S. thesis, Earth and Environment Department, Franklin and Marshall College, 98