Premium
Impacts of urbanization on chloride and stream invertebrates: A 10‐year citizen science field study of road salt in stormwater runoff
Author(s) -
Haake Danelle M.,
Krchma Stephen,
Meyners Claire W.,
Virag Robert
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
integrated environmental assessment and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.665
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1551-3793
pISSN - 1551-3777
DOI - 10.1002/ieam.4594
Subject(s) - watershed , stormwater , environmental science , urbanization , water quality , surface runoff , chloride , invertebrate , hydrology (agriculture) , aquatic ecosystem , environmental chemistry , environmental engineering , ecology , chemistry , engineering , biology , geotechnical engineering , organic chemistry , machine learning , computer science
The use of deicing agents during the winter months is one of many stressors that impact stream ecosystems in urban and urbanizing watersheds. In this study, a long‐term data set collected by citizen scientists with the Missouri Stream Team was used to evaluate the relationships between watershed urbanization metrics and chloride metrics. Further, these data were used to explore the effects of elevated chloride concentrations on stream invertebrate communities using quantile regression. While the amount of road surface in a watershed was a dominant factor in predicting the maximum chloride measurement, the median chloride concentration was also strongly related to the amount of medium‐to‐high density development in the watershed, suggesting that nonmunicipal salt use is an important contributor to increases in base flow chloride concentrations. Additionally, chloride concentration appears to be one of the many factors that impact invertebrate density and diversity measurements, with decreases in invertebrate diversity corresponding with the US Environmental Protection Agency water quality criteria. Our findings suggest that the use of chloride‐based road salt on municipal roads as well as on nonmunicipal settings is contributing to a loss of diversity and density of aquatic invertebrate communities in urban regions. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2022;18:1667–1677. © 2022 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).