Citizen Science Documents Climate Change Impacts on a Sierra Nevada Foothill Watershed
Climate Change Impacts on a Sierra Nevada Foothill Watershed Two Decades of Citizen-Science Data Demonstrate Climate-Driven Shifts in Perennial Stream Water Quality
Presenter:
Jeff Lauder | University of California Merced and Sierra Streams Institute
https://sierrastreamsinstitute.org/
Recorded at the 2020 California Aquatic Bioassessment Workgroup
www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/swamp/bioassessment/cabw.html
Detecting climate change-induced impacts on water quality is an important step in developing watershed-scale stream climate change resilience strategies including restoration and management objectives. However, such an analysis is difficult and dependent on datasets that cover large spatial scales at high resolution over sufficiently long time periods to detect both climatic signals and the potential range of natural background variation. The use of extreme climatic events can serve as “natural experiments” to provide upper and lower bounds for parsing climatic signals from this background variation. Here we leverage 20 years of monthly citizen-science water quality monitoring data in a Northern Sierra Nevada foothill watershed to ask how climate stress, local-scale stress, and their interactions influence stream water quality. This dataset includes both the wettest (2011, 2017, 2018) and hottest and driest (2012-2016) periods on record for the region, providing a unique opportunity to assess whole-watershed resilience to extreme events and whether climate change signals can be parsed from background variation. Such an analysis paves the way for the identification of management objectives that incorporate both small-scale water quality and long-term climate change resilience.