Linking landscape patterns to sources of water contamination: Implications for tracking fecal contaminants with geospatial and Bayesian approaches

Abstract

Microbial source tracking (MST) techniques have been designed to identify the host source of fecal contamination in water. However, current MST techniques cannot provide geographic origins of particular sources because they do not provide any spatial information beyond the points of observation. In this study, the associations between landscape patterns and the major sources of microbial contamination were examined and the application of geospatial techniques (e.g., remote sensing and geographic information systems) and Bayesian modeling was explored to track microbial sources over the landscape. The land cover information of three watersheds (the lower Dungeness Watershed, the Middle Rio Grande Watershed, and the Arroyo Burro Watershed) in the United States was obtained either by classifying high resolution satellite images or directly using land cover datasets (e.g., National Land Cover Dataset, 2006 and 2011). Then, the relationship between land use/land cover (LULC) and microbial sources from these three geographically disparate watersheds were analyzed using Bayesian hierarchical models. The results showed the predictive positive associations between human sources of fecal contamination and developed area, between dog sources and grassland, and between bird sources and water, but negative associations between human sources and forest and water areas. Furthermore, the diversity of microbial sources had positive associations with landscape fragmentation and diversity indices. This study demonstrates associations between landscape patterns and major microbial sources and offers new insight in tracking the dominant sources of fecal contamination in water using geospatial and Bayesian techniques.