Assessment of Stream Integrity in Relation to Neighboring Land Use Coverage

Abstract

Landscape morphology of a watershed plays an important role on determination of the ecological health in the stream or river ecosystems. A habitat-riparian index system (HIS) is a newly developed metric to estimate stream naturalness in Korea. In this study, we focus on a predictive assessment of the HIS associated with stream integrity, and then aim to evaluate essential features of the stream integrity in conjunction with ambient land use patterns obtained from geographical information system (GIS). Concerning the stream health assessment, we applied a decision-tree model to the HIS prediction. As a results, the best models of the decision-trees exhibited a 72.2% accuracy in prediction of the stream health index, and also a 65.8% accuracy in classifying river catchments. A hierarchical structure of the decision tree models in effect, was able to identify and classify more influential land use patterns that could reflex stream integrity. We highlight that GIS-involved analyses and approaches accommodates a wide variety of benefits in a rapid assessment of ecological data associated with field measurements. Furthermore, such methodological applications will be able to become an effective alternative for efficient ecological health assessment in streams and rivers.