The effect of riparian land use on transport hydraulics in agricultural headwater streams located in northeast Ohio, USA

✍ Scribed by Kyle S. Herrman; Virginie Bouchard; Tim Granata; Anne E. Carey; Richard H. Moore

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 245 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6087
• DOI: 10.1002/hyp.7489

✦ Synopsis

This study examined if riparian land use (forested vs agricultural) affects hydraulic transport in headwater streams located in an agriculturally fragmented watershed. We identified paired 50-m reaches (one reach in agricultural land use and the other in forested land use) along three headwater streams in the Upper Sugar Creek Watershed in northeast Ohio, USA (40 °51 0 42 00 N, 81 °50 0 29 00 W). Using breakthrough curves obtained by Rhodamine WT slug injections and the one-dimensional transport with inflow and storage model (OTIS), hydraulic transport parameters were obtained for each reach on six different occasions (n D 36). Relative transient storage (A S : A) was similar between both reach types (As: A D 0Ð3 š 0Ð1 for both agricultural and forested reaches). Comparing values of F med 200 to those in the literature indicates that the effect of transient storage was moderately high in the study streams in the Upper Sugar Creek Watershed. Examining travel times revealed that overall residence time (HRT) and residence time in transient storage (T STO ) were both longer in forested reaches (forested HRT D 19Ð1 š 11Ð5 min and T STO D 4Ð0 š 3Ð8 min; agricultural HRT D 9Ð3 š 5Ð3 min and T STO D 1Ð7 š 1Ð4 min). We concluded that the effect of transient storage on solute transport was similar between the forested and agricultural reaches but the forested reaches had a greater potential to retain solutes as a result of longer travel times.