Within-Reach Temperature Heterogeneity is Limited in a Southern Appalachian Stream Network: Implications for Climate Change Refugia and Reach-Scale Temperature Mapping
Kaz A, Troia M, Giam X. 2020. Within-Reach Temperature Heterogeneity is Limited in a Southern Appalachian Stream Network: Implications for Climate Change Refugia and Reach-Scale Temperature Mapping. University of Tennessee
Chancellor's Honors Program Project: Supervised Undergraduate Student Research and Creative Work ABSTRACT: Water temperature is an important determinant of species distributions in flowing freshwater environments, however anthropogenic climate change threatens many freshwater species as suitable habitat shifts upslope or is expunged. These distribution changes will depend, in part, upon within-reach temperature heterogeneity and its potential to provide cold refugia. We monitored stream temperatures at 162 locations in six streams of the Little River watershed (Blount County, TN) during the summer of 2018 with the goal of assessing fine scale temperature heterogeneity (FSTH) and identifying local environmental factors driving within-reach temperature heterogeneity. Overall, we show that FSTH increases with mean air temperature and stream size, as well as from high to low elevation. Even so, FSTH was greater among reaches and seasons than it was within them, suggesting limited thermal refugia. These findings suggest that thermally sensitive biota will need to move to upslope reaches to seek thermal refuge as climate warming progresses. These findings also validate stream temperature modeling and mapping applications performed at the spatial resolution of confluence-to-confluence stream reaches based on GIS data layers.
- Type
- Academic
- Authors
- Kaz, Anna; Troia, Matthew; Giam, Xingli
- Date of Issue
- 2020-05
- Publisher
- University of Tennessee
- Units
- GRSM
- Keywords
- climate change, fish conservation, GRSM-02008, GRSM-02046, Little River, thermal refugia, thesis