Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design

Department

Forest Resource Management

Committee Chair

Nicolas Zegre

Committee Co-Chair

Michael Strager

Committee Member

Christopher Russoniello

Abstract

All healthy ecosystems, communities, and economies are founded on access to clean, adequate water sources to support ecosystem services, provide clean drinking water, and allow the production of water-intensive goods and services. The state of available water resources must be analyzed through the lens of water security, defined as the capability to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for people, the economy, and ecosystems. Mountain regions are sources of freshwater resources for downstream regions, which produce disproportionately higher runoff than downstream regions. As a result, mountain regions are often referred to as natural water towers for that disproportionately high rainfall and snowpack due to orographic processes and their contribution of freshwater resources to downstream communities and ecosystems.

Despite the importance of these water towers, they are vulnerable to the growing global anthropogenic and climatic change impacts. Anthropogenic factors such as population growth, urbanization, and pollution alongside increasing temperatures and seasonal shifts threaten the ability of global water towers to sustain the water supply to between 1.6 to 3 billion people today and a projected 1.5 billion more people by the mid-twenty-first century. Studies analyzing the importance and vulnerability of global water towers state that immediate action is required to safeguard future water supply.

While present water security studies have predominantly focused on arid regions, there is a myth of abundance of water resources in humid regions. Coarse spatial scale models that analyze the water security of global water towers provide important insight into regional, continental, and global scale water systems but mask the localized scarcity and water security of individual watersheds. An example of this is the state of West Virginia in the eastern US mid-Atlantic region, an important headwater region to the Mississippi and Potomac water basins. West Virginia is characterized by low population, high forest land cover, over 88,232 km of tributaries and rivers, high surface roughness, and steep topographic gradients of the Appalachian Mountains. Despite these favorable water supply characteristics, West Virginia faces water insecurity stemming from frequent flooding, widescale pollution, degraded ecosystem function, poor access to safe drinking water, and a political economy that prioritizes resource extraction and chemical manufacturing. The development of sustainable management of water resources for both quantity and quality demands an understanding of current water resource availability and who, when, and where water is used. To contribute to addressing these needs, this thesis is comprised of two studies: 1. Quantifying contemporary water use in West Virginia and 2. Quantifying the downstream dependence of water produced in West Virginia.

The first study compared two water use datasets to quantify the distribution of water use for different water use sectors in West Virginia to gain insights into who, where, when, and how much is used. We disaggregated a federal dataset, the USGS water use Dataset for the Nation, and a state dataset, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Large Quantity User (LQU) Dataset, into reasonably similar water use sectors. This output will provide water resource managers with insight as to the strengths and limitations of current water resource accounting practices, with recommendations on how to improve current water use reporting to advance sustainable water resource management in West Virginia.

According to the LQU dataset, in 2019, there was a reported 665 billion gallons used, broken down into ten water use sectors: Thermoelectric (60.9% of LQU total), Chemical (20.5%), Public Water Supply (10.5%), Industrial (3%), Mining (2%), Agriculture/Aquaculture (1.7%), Recreation (0.1%, Timber (0.1%), and Petroleum (

The second study built a community-scale water tower model of the Potomac River basin that showed the impact of hinterland high-elevation forested land cover on Washington DC's metropolitan area's hydrologic upstream-downstream dependency and future water security. Two indices were developed using 4-km gridded datasets of runoff and water use. The first was the RWY which showed where runoff is being generated within the watershed. The second index was the WRC which showed what role hinterland cells played in supplying downstream water demands. Results from a relative water yield and water resource contribution index, we identified that high elevation, forested landcover such as Michaux State Forest in South-eastern PA, Catoctin Mountain Park and Cunningham Falls State Park in Eastern MD, the Allegheny Mountain range, and George Washington National Forest in North-eastern VA, and in Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National recreation area alongside Blackwater Falls State Park in Eastern West Virginia are important in disproportional runoff generation for the Washington DC metropolitan area. The entire Potomac River basin for 2000-2020 was identified as important for meeting seasonal needs in downstream water demand. However, the urbanized Shenandoah Valley floor surrounding Harrisonburg, VA, contributed the least amount of runoff to the Washington DC metropolitan area and was less important in meeting seasonal demand increases. With projected Washington DC metropolitan area water demand expected to double by 2085, research conducted by the Interstate Commission of the Potomac River Basin suggests that basin hinterland water supply will not supply the anticipated increase in water demand. This identified high-elevation, forested landcover area can be prioritized for conservation, restoration, and enhancement of ecosystem services to protect the future water supply of the Washington DC metropolitan area. This study highlights the importance for hinterland regions of watersheds to be included in water governance strategies, policies, and practices to ensure the future water security of watershed basins.

This thesis includes two studies that give important insight into water resource management in West Virginia and the Potomac River basin. Insight from quantifying and comparing the USGS and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection water use datasets provides recommendations to improve the LQU dataset to better inform sustainable water resource management across West Virginia. Quantification of the importance of the Potomac hinterland showed that the Washington DC metropolitan area was dependent on hinterland water supply to meet seasonal demands, alongside providing spatially explicit insights into where land conservation and restoration efforts should be undertaken within the Potomac River basin. These studies advance hydrologic science by providing a water tower for communities, a flexible framework applicable to any basin across the US. This allows water resource managers to quantify upstream-downstream dependency within their respective watersheds and use the model insights to develop policies and practices to protect future basin water security.

Embargo Reason

Publication Pending

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