![[logo] US EPA](../gif/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Little Miami River Basin: Overview
Little Miami project was created in support of the NERL Internal Grant Riparian Zone and
Watershed Protection. The goal is to support watershed restoration in two
ways: 1) The development and validations of methods for the facile and
quantitative characterization of riparian zone land cover; 2) elucidation
of the relative importance of distal (larger scale, watershed scale) land
cover with the proximal (riparian zone) cover in influencing stream water
quality and biological integrity.
This task was conducted on a set of small subwatersheds, nested in the study area. The following strategy was employed: 1) development of methods to measure riparian zone quality over a basin scale, 2) evaluate and rank these riparian metrics by correlating them with the stream quality, 3) determine the scale of land cover by watershed, subwatershed, and riparian zone which is driving water quality and/or biological integrity in the reach.