PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #60: Remote Sensing and GIS. Presiding: A. Gallant.
Thursday, August 9, 2001. 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Hall of Ideas E.
GIS watershed assessment of regional coal mining impacts .
Bruns, Dale1,2, Sweet, Tom1, Toothill, Bill2, 1 2
ABSTRACT- This pilot study addressed land use impacts to river basin water quality from past and ongoing coal mining activities on 16,000 acres of abandoned mining lands within the Upper Susquehanna-Lackawanna (US-L) River watershed in northeastern Pennsylvania. The regional US-L watershed covers 2000 square miles and has been heavily impacted over the last 150 years; reclamation costs of abandoned mining lands and acid mine drainage combined are estimated at $2 billion. An early pilot project used GIS and remote sensing to assess 18 subcatchments and test for associations in land use/land cover with selected field sampling of water chemistry and benthic communities of the river ecosystem. A biodiversity index of aquatic macroinvertebrate communities was negatively and strongly correlated with the proportion of a watershed in mining land cover. Similar statistically significant associations were detected for lowered pH, high acidity, and high sulfate (e.g., acid mine drainage). Based on this pilot study, additional applications of GIS to watershed problems on a regional basis include: 1) the design of a GIS environmental master plan based on a hierarchical spatial approach to watershed scale, 2) a Web based GIS architecture for sharing local data, and 3) community partnering on real-time water quality monitoring linked via telemetry to the Internet.
KEY WORDS: GIS and remote sensing, watershed assessment, abandoned mining lands, acid mine drainage