We are compiling a long-term regional water temperature database for rivers and streams in the Ozark, Ouachita and Southeast Coastal Plains ecoregions shown on the map below, to identify where nonlinear ecological and environmental thresholds are likely to occur under future conditions, even in streams lacking direct monitoring data.
Our goal is to link disparate long-term biological, hydrologic and stream temperature data within a comprehensive centralized, geospatial database and leverage high performance computing to predict how species and assemblages will respond to hydrologic, thermal variations and land use change in streams with different flow regimes.
The future online stream temperature database for the Ozark, Ouachita and Southeast Coastal Plains Region will include interactive online maps and tools for natural resource managers and other stakeholders to easily access and visualize site-specific hydrologic, thermal and land use threshold information for fish and macroinvertebrate assemblages.
DATA CITATION
To ensure research provenance and sustainable data citation we will maintain linkages between copies of stream temperature data and the researcher/labs who submit their datasets. Names of contributors will be assigned to each stream temperature dataset and to summary data using X and Y geographic coordinates and a unique numeric 14-digit USGS stream reach code corresponding to stream segments in the National Hydrography Database (NHD).