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- Title
Impacts of urbanization on chloride and stream invertebrates: A 10‐year citizen science field study of road salt in stormwater runoff.
- Authors
Haake, Danelle M.; Krchma, Stephen; Meyners, Claire W.; Virag, Robert
- Abstract
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). KEY POINTS: The amount of road in a watershed is an important factor in predicting the maximum chloride concentration in a stream, while both road area and medium‐to‐high density development in the watershed are important in predicting median chloride concentrations.Chloride concentrations in urban streams are a limiting factor to the diversity and density of aquatic invertebrates, with decreases in invertebrate measures as chloride concentrations increase.While municipal salt use on roadways is an important contributing factor to chloride loads in streams, contributions from nonmunicipal sources (e.g., sidewalks and parking lots) are also a driver of chloride loads and are in need of further study.
- Subjects
RUNOFF; URBAN watersheds; INVERTEBRATE diversity; URBAN ecology; CITIZEN science; CITIES &; towns
- Publication
Integrated Environmental Assessment & Management, 2022, Vol 18, Issue 6, p1667
- ISSN
1551-3777
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1002/ieam.4594