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Where are valued resources that are being stressed?
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One objective of the regional manager is to locate watersheds in which high levels of valued resources occur together with moderate levels of stressors. These watersheds are of value to society because they still contain significant resources. In these areas, it would be worth considering remediation efforts to lower the number and level of stressors or initiating actions to protect these watersheds from further development.
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Results from this analysis illustrate some of the subtle features of vulnerability analysis. For example, the watershed containing Baltimore is highly stressed but is not among the most vulnerable because few valued resources remain. The highlands are not among the most vulnerable because there is little human activity in these watersheds. If we focus on the most vulnerable watersheds we find a dozen areas with similar properties. They are rural suburban areas or watersheds containing smaller cities such as Allentown and Raleigh. They have populations and/or population growth in the upper two quintiles but human resources, such as low poverty and low infant death, are still in the lower two quintiles of the region. These human resources are likely to be vulnerable to further urbanization and population growth. Many of these vulnerable watersheds have agriculture on steep slopes, in riparian zones, and on erosable soils. Combined with high levels of air deposition, agriculture has led to high levels of nitrogen in the aquatic systems and only one of the watersheds, Raleigh, retains native aquatic organisms in the highest two quintiles. While the aquatic resources have been largely lost, significant terrestrial resources remain. The forests are stressed by fragmentation, ozone, and exotic species but still have considerable forest resources in hardwoods and softwoods and five of the watersheds have native terrestrial fauna in the upper two quintiles of the region. Thus, the analysis was able to identify a set of watersheds that have largely lost their aquatic resources but retained human and terrestrial resources that are vulnerable to further stresses.
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