Assessing Riparian Buffer Zone Health of Pinhook Creek, Madison County, AL, using NASA's Remotely Sensed Data to Understand Impacts on Water Quality and Quantity

A riparian buffer zone (RBZ) is a vegetated area adjacent to water ways and acts to increase water infiltration, filtration, to reduce turbidity, and to regulate water quantity. The purpose of establishing a RBZ is to increase water quality and decrease water quantity. NASA's Multi-Resolution Land Cover (MRLC) National Land Cover Database (NLCD) land cover imagery is used in an integrative way to address the environmental impact of land cover on riparian buffer zone quality and may help shape policy and development practices in the future. The purpose of this study is to understand how urban developed space impacts water quality and quantity in the Pinhook Creek RBZ, an urban waterway, located in Huntsville, Alabama. The state of the RBZ was assessed with physical watershed characteristics such as land cover land use (LCLU), soils, and slope data that characterizes the RBZ. MRLC NLCD land cover data from 2011, a product of NASA's Landsat imagery, will be used to obtain the LCLU that describe the Pinhook Creek RBZ. Using ArcGIS, ArcMap 10.3, MRLC NLCD land cover data, clipped to a 30 meter RBZ, will be delineated from Pinhook Creek sub-watersheds (SW) to identify the areas contributing the most annual sediment load and greatest runoff quantity. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and the NRCS curve number and will be used to calculate annual sediment load and runoff from each SW of the Pinhook Creek watershed. A naturalized RBZ will be simulated to compare annual sediment load of the 2011 RBZ with an ideal RBZ, one with vegetative cover as the greatest LCLU. An average precipitation storm and a severe precipitation storm will be simulated to compare runoff quantities. Results show that there is a significant relationship between annual sediment load and urban developed space (p=0.008) within the RBZ. Additionally, runoff quantity is significantly correlated to urban developed space (p=0.004) within the Pinhook RBZ. A well maintained RBZ can provide a more sustainable urban environment by increasing water quality, conserving aquatic habitat, increasing biodiversity among other benefits.