Cumulative Impacts Of Landuse On Water Quality In A Southern Appalachian Watershed

Abstract

Environmental planning and regulatory mandates require assessment of water quality changes associat-ed with distributed landuse activities (in this study, as in much of the literature, landuse and landcover will be used interchangeably, and refer to general classes of landcover associated with specific land-uses). Such environmental analyses can be approached from a “cumulative effects” or “cumulative impacts” viewpoint (Sidle and Hombeck, 1991). Gosselink .et al. (1990) have defined cumulative impacts as the incremental, summed, or interactive effects of human action, added to past, present, and reasonably foreseeable effects. The impetus for cumu-lative impact analyses on forest land includes the Multiple-Use and Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, the National Forest Management Act of 1976, and the Clean Water Act of 1977 (Sidle and Hornbeck, 1991).

Citation

Bolstad, Paul V.; Swank, Wayne T. 1997. Cumulative Impacts Of Landuse On Water Quality In A Southern Appalachian Watershed. JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION VOL. 33, NO. 3, JUNE 1997. 15 p.