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Presented at the NABS Annual meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2004
in Conservation Ecology 2
Suitability of a GIS-based classification approach for characterizing aquatic system diversity and conservation planning in the Upper Delaware River Watershed
C.D. Apse1, B.P. Baldigo2, M.S. Batcher3, and G.E. Schuler1. 1The Nature Conservancy, 108 Main Street, New Paltz, NY , 2U.S. Geological Survey, 425 Jordan Rd, Troy, NY 12180, 3Michael Batcher Consulting, 1907 Buskirk-West Hoosick Rd, Buskirk, NY 12028
Understanding and predicting patterns of aquatic species and community diversity at the landscape scale is a critical challenge for conservation science. Effective conservation planning for rivers in the northeastern U.S. is impeded by the lack of community and species level data and a generally accepted aquatic community classification framework. A hierarchical, GIS-based classification scheme was developed for the Upper Delaware River Watershed to predict aquatic ecological system types. The defined ecological systems are river segments with similar abiotic characteristics such as size, geology, gradient, and elevation. These system types are designed as a proxy for species and community patterns as well as a “coarse filter” for conservation planning. This classification was tested in the Neversink River Basin, a subwatershed of the Upper Delaware, using benthic macroinvertebrate, fish, and mussel data collected from 1997 to 2003. Relations between observed (field) data, predicted ecological system types, and constituent environmental variables were evaluated to determine the efficacy of the classification. The results lead to a refinement of this approach that elucidates the relative ecological significance of particular environmental characteristics in the Neversink River watershed. Lessons from this investigation can be applied to conservation planning and aquatic community classification in the Northeast.
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