Matthew Diebel

United States Geological Survey | USGS · Upper Midwest Water Science Center

Preventing invasive species establishment is a global conservation priority, yet limited management resources oftentimes restrict sites to target for prevention or monitoring. Risk assessments based on habitat suitability can identify sites most vulnerable to invasion that should be prioritized for preventative actions. Since habitat suitability is...

The purpose of this document is to provide technical guidance on the design of water quality monitoring projects, with a focus on projects to assess the effectiveness of conservation practices in agricultural watersheds. Common applications include 9 Key Element plans, NRCS National Water Quality Initiative partnerships, Adaptive Management plans a...

Robertson DM, Diebel MW. 2020. Importance of accurately quantifying internal loading in developing phosphorus reduction strategies for a chain of shallow lakes. Lake Reserv Manage. XX:XXX–XXX. The Winnebago Pool is a chain of 4 shallow lakes in Wisconsin. Because of high external phosphorus (P) inputs to the lakes, the lakes became highly eutrophic...

Watersheds deliver numerous pollutants to the coastline of oceans and lakes, thereby jeopardizing ecosystem services. Regulatory frameworks for stressors often focus on loading rates without accounting for the physical dynamics of the receiving water body. Here, we use a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model to simulate the transport of a generic tr...

The Winnebago Pool is a chain of four shallow lakes (Lake Poygan, Lake Winneconne, Lake Butte des Morts, and Lake Winnebago) that are fed primarily by the Fox and Wolf Rivers, two large agriculturally dominated rivers in Wisconsin, United States. Because the lakes have received extensive phos¬phorus inputs from their watershed, they have become hig...

A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for transportation, leading to fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems. Many nations are striving to address both maintenance backlogs and mitigation of environmental impacts as their infrastructure ages. Here, we test whether accounting for road repair needs cou...

Structures that block movement of fish through river networks are built to serve a variety of societal needs, including transportation, hydroelectric power, and exclusion of exotic species. Due to their abundance, road crossings and dams reduce the amount of habitat available to fish that migrate from the sea or lakes into rivers to breed. The bene...

Traditional hydraulically designed culverts impede ecological connectivity and degrade aquatic ecosystems. This problem is compounded by their ubiquity in the built environment. To overcome these limitations, alternative designs have been created to facilitate natural conditions and restore ecological connectivity. However, these “ecological design...

Understanding how and why lakes vary and respond to different drivers through time and space is needed to understand, predict, and manage freshwater quality in an era of rapidly changing land use and climate. Water clarity regulates many characteristics of aquatic ecosystems and is responsive to watershed features, making it a sentinel of environme...

The presence of dams, stream-road crossings and other infrastructure often compromises the connectivity of rivers, leading to reduced fish abundance and diversity. The assessment and mitigation of river barriers is critical to the success of restoration efforts aimed at restoring river integrity. In this study, we present a combined modelling appro...

Water resources and transportation infrastructure such as dams and culverts provide countless socio-economic benefits; however, this infrastructure can also disconnect the movement of organisms, sediment, and water through river ecosystems. Trade-offs associated with these competing costs and benefits occur globally, with applications in barrier ad...

Significance Societies around the world make massive investments in ecosystem restoration projects to mitigate habitat loss, conserve biodiversity, and boost ecosystem services. We use a return-on-investment framework to assess the value of coordinating restoration efforts in space and time to maximize ecological connectivity between the Laurentian...

Habitat fragmentation impedes dispersal of aquatic fauna, and barrier removal is increasingly used to increase stream network connectivity and facilitate fish dispersal. Improved understanding of fish community response to barrier removal is needed, especially in fragmented agricultural streams where numerous antiquated dams are likely destined for...

AimOur goal was to predict road culvert passability, as defined by culvert outlet drop and outlet water velocity, for three fish swimming groups using remotely collected environmental variables that have been shown to influence the passability of road culverts.LocatioLaurentian Great Lakes Basin, north-eastern North America, on the Canada–USA borde...

Tributaries to the Great Lakes are highly fragmented by dams and road crossings that act as potential barriers to migratory fishes, restricting their access to historical riverine spawning grounds. The removal or modification of barriers can restore migratory pathways for these species, but removal costs and habitat gains differ markedly among pote...

Background/Question/Methods Access to spawning grounds in tributaries of the Great Lakes is drastically reduced for dozens of migratory fishes by >275,000 dams and road crossings, motivating efforts to restore habitat connectivity by removing or modifying these barriers. Unfortunately, these efforts may also increase available habitat for invasiv...

Road crossings can act as barriers to the movement of stream fishes, resulting in habitat fragmentation, reduced population resilience to environmental disturbance and higher risks of extinction. Strategic barrier removal has the potential to improve connectivity in stream networks, but managers lack a consistent framework for determining which pro...

Rivers maintain diverse biota that are highly vulnerable to human disturbance. Globally, dams and roads fragment riverscapes, altering flows and fish movements. In the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin, efforts are being made to establish remediation priorities by identifying outdated dams or poorly constructed road crossings that prohibit or impede fis...

Emergent aquatic insects can provide inputs to terrestrial ecosystems near lentic and lotic waterbodies, producing ecosystem linkages at the aquatic–terrestrial interface. Although aquatic insect emergence has been examined for individual sites, the magnitude and spatial distribution of this phenomenon has not been examined at regional spatial scal...

Background/Question/Methods Rivers in the Great Lakes basin are highly fragmented due to the presence of thousands of in-stream barriers (dams and road-stream crossings). For migratory fishes such as walleye, lake sturgeon, and coaster brook trout, these barriers restrict breeding migrations and limit access to historical riverine spawning grounds...

Systematic methods for prioritizing the repair and removal of fish passage barriers, while growing of late, have hitherto focused almost exclusively on meeting the needs of migratory fish species (e.g., anadromous salmonids). An important but as of yet unaddressed issue is the development of new modeling approaches which are applicable to resident...

A key challenge in aquatic restoration efforts is documenting locations where ecological connectivity is disrupted in water bodies that are dammed or crossed by roads (road crossings). To prioritize actions aimed at restoring connectivity, we argue that there is a need for systematic inventories of these potential barriers at regional and national...

Longitudinal connections within river networks and between lakes and tributary systems play important roles in the life cycles of many Great Lakes fish species. These roles include movement among distinct habitats for spawning, feeding, and over-wintering, refuge from thermal stress and disturbances such as floods and pollution events, and migratio...

A key challenge in regional and transboundary conservation decision making is identifying spatial datasets that are freely available at a similar resolution. This issue is particularly problematic for fresh waters, which commonly cross political boundaries. Instream barriers (e.g., dams, road crossings) have been identified as a restoration priorit...

Ecological connectivity and the costs associated with restoring or protecting connections are important considerations for effective freshwater conservation. Accountancy of connections within large freshwater systems requires access to spatial data that depict the distribution and connections of water bodies across the entire system. Identifying pr...

Ecological connectivity and the costs associated with restoring or protecting connections are important considerations for effective freshwater conservation. Accountancy of connections within large freshwater systems requires access to spatial data that depict the distribution and connections of water bodies across the entire system. Identifying pr...

A key challenge in regional and transboundary conservation decision making is identifying spatial datasets that are freely available at a similar resolution. This issue is particularly problematic for fresh waters, which commonly cross political boundaries. Instream barriers (e.g., dams, road crossings) have been identified as a restoration priorit...

Longitudinal connectivity of flowing water ecosystems has been dramatically altered by the widespread construction of dams, road crossings, and water diversion structures. These barriers limit the ability of fish to move among different habitats, escape disturbance, and breed with other populations. Strategic barrier removal has been recognized as...

Recruitment of juvenile northern pike in Green Bay of Lake Michigan has been reduced by loss of tributary spawning habitat, through both habitat degradation and barriers to access. Upgrading or improving road crossings (typically culverts) to facilitate fish passage has the potential to be an efficient way to increase pike recruitment because manag...

Background/Question/Methods There is increasing recognition of connections across traditionally-defined ecosystem boundaries. Although the flux of matter and energy across ecotones can have important implications for the recipient ecosystems, assessing these linkages has been challenging. Here, we generate an empirical model of the potential flux...

Road crossings over streams can act as barriers to fish movement. Because road crossings are ubiquitous in developed areas, their cumulative effects have the potential to limit fish population persistence at large scales. The objective of this study was to create a method for identifying road crossings whose reconstruction would most benefit stream...

Are environmental science students developing the mindsets and obtaining the tools needed to help address the considerable challenges posed by the 21st century? Today's major environmental issues are characterized by high-stakes decisions and high levels of uncertainty. Although traditional scientific approaches are valuable, contemporary environme...

Stream restoration projects often aim to benefit aquatic biota and frequently use the reappearance of sensitive nongame fish species as a measure of restoration success. However, mitigation of human influence will only benefit a given species where static habitat characteristics are suitable for that species and where potential source populations a...

The nitrogen stable isotope ratio of biological tissue has been proposed as an indicator of anthropogenic N inputs to aquatic ecosystems, but overlap in the isotopic signatures of various N sources and transformations make definitive attribution of processes difficult. We collected primary consumer invertebrates from streams in agricultural setting...

Riparian buffers have the potential to improve stream water quality in agricultural landscapes. This potential may vary in response to landscape characteristics such as soils, topography, land use, and human activities, including legacies of historical land management. We built a predictive model to estimate the sediment and phosphorus load reducti...

Agricultural nonpoint source pollution remains a persistent environmental problem, despite the large amount of money that has been spent on its abatement. At local scales, agricultural best management practices (BMPs) have been shown to be effective at reducing nutrient and sediment inputs to surface waters. However, these effects have rarely been...

Agricultural non-point source (NPS) pollution poses a severe threat to water quality and aquatic ecosystems. In response, tremendous efforts have been directed toward reducing these pollution inputs by implementing agricultural conservation practices. Although conservation practices reduce pollution inputs from individual fields, scaling pollution...

The role of competition in forbidding similar species from co-occurring has long been debated. A difficulty in identifying this repulsion of similar species is that similar species share similar environmental requirements and hence show an attraction to communities where these requirements are met. To disentangle these opposing patterns, we use phy...

The use of land management practices such as buffers to intercept agricultural runoff is a common approach to restoring stream water quality. The benefits realized through these practices can be compounded by implementing a program in the entire contributing area of the target stream. Choosing appropriately-sized watersheds for evaluation is import...

Riparian buffers have the potential to reduce nutrient and sediment loads in streams. This load reduction potential varies among watersheds and describes the utility of buffers as a management practice. We present a model for estimating sediment and phosphorus load reduction potential at the spatial grain of the small watershed. Load reduction pote...