Abstract
The development of a total maximum daily load (TMDL) for water bodies impaired by elevated microbial levels (the second leading cause of impairment nationally) requires an understanding of microbial transport processes at the watershed scale. Continuous monitoring of impaired water bodies can be expensive, and models are typically employed, but most current models represent bacteria as single discrete (“free” phase) organisms with near-neutral buoyancy, subject to first-order decay resulting primarily from predation or die-off. Studies indicate, however, that a significant fraction of microbes are associated with sediment particles, both in the water column and bed-sediments, associations that can impact microbial transport behavior and survival rates. This work incorporates considerations of microbial partitioning and its impact on survival into microbial fate and transport modeling using a well-characterized watershed. Agreement between observed and modeled instream microbial concentrations is comparabl...
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