Investigating water quality sensitivity to climate variability and its influencing factors in four Lake Erie watersheds

Runzi Wang; Yueying Ma; Gang Zhao; Yuhan Zhou; Isabella Shehab; Allen Burton

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116449

Investigating water quality sensitivity to climate variability and its influencing factors in four Lake Erie watersheds

J Environ Manage. 2023 Jan 1;325(Pt A):116449. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116449. Epub 2022 Oct 15.

Authors

Runzi Wang¹, Yueying Ma², Gang Zhao³, Yuhan Zhou⁴, Isabella Shehab⁵, Allen Burton⁶

Affiliations

¹ School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1041, USA. Electronic address: runziw@umich.edu.
² Community and Regional Planning Program, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, 310 Inner Campus Drive B7500, Austin, TX, 78712, USA. Electronic address: yueyingma0626@utexas.edu.
³ Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, 260 Panama St, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA. Electronic address: gzhao@carnegiescience.edu.
⁴ School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1041, USA. Electronic address: zhyuhan@umich.edu.
⁵ School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1041, USA. Electronic address: ishehab@umich.edu.
⁶ School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109-1041, USA. Electronic address: burtonal@umich.edu.

PMID: 36252329
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.116449

Abstract

Climate change alters weather patterns and hydrological cycle, thus potentially aggravating water quality impairment. However, the direct relationships between climate variability and water quality are complicated by a multitude of hydrological and biochemical mechanisms dominate the process. Thus, little is known regarding how water quality responds to climate variability in the context of changing meteorological conditions and human activities. Here, a longitudinal study was conducted using trend, correlation, and redundancy analyses to explore stream water quality sensitivity to temperature, precipitation, streamflow, and how the sensitivity was affected by watershed climate, land cover percentage, landscape configuration, fertilizer application, and tillage types. Specifically, daily pollutant concentration data of suspended solid (SS), total phosphorus (TP), soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN), nitrate and nitrite (NO_x), and chloride (Cl) were used as water quality indicators in four Lake Erie watersheds from 1985 to 2017, during which the average temperature has increased 0.5 °C and the total precipitation has increased 9%. Results show that precipitation and flow were positively associated with SRP, NO_x, TKN, TP, and SS, except for SRP and NO_x in the urban basin. The rising temperatures led to increasing concentrations of SS, TKN, and TP in the urban basin. SRP and NO_x sensitivity to precipitation was higher in the years with more precipitation and higher precipitation seasonality, and the basins with more spatially aggregated cropland. No-tillage and reduced tillage management could decrease both precipitation and temperature sensitivity for most pollutants. As one of the first studies leveraging multiple watershed environmental variables with long-term historical climate and water quality data, this study can assist target land use planning and management policy to mitigate future climate change effects on surface water quality.

Keywords: Climate change; Conservation practice; Great lake; Land cover; Soluble reactive phosphorus.

MeSH terms

Climate Change
Environmental Monitoring
Humans
Lakes*
Longitudinal Studies
Nitrogen / analysis
Phosphorus / analysis
Rivers
Water Quality*

Substances

Phosphorus
Nitrogen