Incorporating Uncertainty Into the Ranking of SPARROW Model Nutrient Yields From Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin Watersheds.

ABSTRACT: Excessive loads of nutrients transported by tributary rivers have been linked to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Management efforts to reduce the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico and improve the water quality of rivers and streams could benefit from targeting nutrient reductions toward watersheds with the highest nutrient yields delivered to sensitive downstream waters. One challenge is that most conventional watershed modeling approaches (e.g., mechanistic models) used in these management decisions do not consider uncertainties in the predictions of nutrient yields and their downstream delivery. The increasing use of parameter estimation procedures to statistically estimate model coefficients, however, allows uncertainties in these predictions to be reliably estimated. Here, we use a rob

SUBMITTER: Robertson DM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3307625 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature