Influence of land use on fine sediment in salmonid spawning gravels within the Russian River Basin, California

Abstract

Relationships between land use or land cover and embeddedness, a measure of fine sediment in spawning gravels, were examined at multiple scales across 54 streams in the Russian River Basin, California. The results suggest that coarse-scale measures of watershed land use can explain a large proportion of the variability in embeddedness and that the explanatory power of this relationship increases with watershed size. Agricultural and urban land uses and road density were positively associated with embeddedness, while the opposite was true for forest cover. The ability of land use and land cover to predict embeddedness varied among five zones of influence, with the greatest explanatory power occurring at the entire-watershed scale. Land use within a more restricted riparian corridor generally did not relate to embeddedness, suggesting that reach-scale riparian protection or restoration will have little influence on levels of fine sediment. The explanatory power of these models was greater when conducted among a subset of the largest watersheds (maximum r2 = 0.73) than among the smallest watersheds (maximum r2 = 0.46).