
Michael J. PaulTetra Tech | TETRATECH · Center for Ecological Sciences
Michael J. Paul
Doctor of Philosophy
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41
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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June 1999 - July 2001
Publications
Publications (41)
The Biological Condition Gradient (BCG) is a conceptual model that describes changes in aquatic communities under increasing levels of anthropogenic stress. The BCG helps decision-makers connect narrative water quality goals (e.g., maintenance of natural structure and function) to quantitative measures of ecological condition by linking index thres...
A total maximum daily load for the Chesapeake Bay requires reduction in pollutant load from sources within the Bay watersheds. The Conestoga River watershed has been identified as a major source of sediment load to the Bay. Upland loads of sediment from agriculture are a concern; however, a large proportion of the sediment load in the Conestoga Riv...
Anticipated future increases in air temperature and regionally variable changes in precipitation will have direct and cascading effects on United States (U.S.) water quality. In this paper, and a companion paper by Coffey et al., we review technical literature addressing the responses of different water quality attributes to historical and potentia...
In this paper we review the published, scientific literature addressing the response of nutrients, sediment, pathogens, and cyanobacterial blooms to historical and potential future changes in air temperature and precipitation. The goal is to document how different attributes of water quality are sensitive to these drivers, to characterize future ri...
Several biochemical and physical factors regulate phytoplankton primary productivity and algal bloom events in estuarine environments. Some of the most important factors include nitrogen, phosphorus and silica availability, light availability, and estuarine flushing potential. A better understanding of these processes is necessary to support sound...
The main objective of this study was to develop a highland Andean streams ecological assessment tool for managers to determine the biological quality in this broad area of South America. Sampling was conducted during the dry season at 123 sites in eight watersheds of high Andean streams from south of Peru to North of Ecuador. The sites were at elev...
Stream biological assessment reflects not just conventional water quality, but an environmental quality that represents the integrity of the stream ecosystem. In Britain, Australia and the United States, macroinvertebrate predictive models were built and applied to stream assessment by employing multivariate analysis. There were variations in these...
There is increasing international interest by water resource management agencies worldwide in developing the capacity for quantitative bioassessments of boatable rivers. This interest stems from legal mandates requiring assessments, plus growing recognition of the threats to such systems from multiple and co-varying stressors (e.g. chemical polluta...
Water resource management encompasses a variety of regulations and mandates relevant to water protection and restoration. Awareness of the value-added biological monitoring and assessment to water resource management
is increasing worldwide, but especially in countries that have implemented proactive water law and regulatory frameworks for
protecti...
Urban streams have been the focus of much research in recent years, but many questions about the mechanisms driving the urban stream syndrome remain unanswered. Identification of key research questions is an important step toward effective, efficient management of urban streams to meet societal goals. We developed a list of priority research questi...
This is the first in a series of three articles designed to establish empirically defined biological indicators and thresholds for impairment for urbanized catchments, and to describe a process by which the biological condition of waterbodies in urbanized catchments can be applied. This article describes alternative gradients of urbanization for as...
Urbanization represents a strong and increasingly more prevalent impact on stream quality worldwide. One of the characteristic effects of increased urbanization is a consistent decline in biological stream condition. The characterization of this biological degradation with increasing urbanization presents a number of advantages for the study and...
Biological indicators, particularly benthic macroinvertebrates, are widely used and effective measures of the impact of urbanization on stream ecosystems. A multimetric biological index of urbanization was developed using a large benthic macroinvertebrate dataset (n = 1,835) from the Baltimore, Maryland, metropolitan area and then validated with...
The world’s population is concentrated in urban areas. This change in demography has brought landscape transformations that
have a number of documented effects on stream ecosystems. The most consistent and pervasive effect is an increase in impervious
surface cover within urban catchments, which alters the hydrology and geomorphology of streams. Th...
Conceptually, tolerance values represent the relative capacity of aquatic organisms to survive and reproduce in the presence
of known levels of stressors. Operationally, they represent the relative abundance and co-location of organisms and stressors.
These numeric values are then used for calculating tolerance metrics. Defensibility of biological...
1. The impact of changes in land use on stream ecosystem function is poorly understood. We studied leaf breakdown, a fundamental process of stream ecosystems, in streams that represent a range of catchment land use in the Piedmont physiographic province of the south‐eastern United States.
2. We placed bags of chalk maple ( Acer barbatum ) leaves in...
Ecologists have described an urban stream syndrome with attributes such as elevated nutrients and contaminants, increased hydrologic flashiness, and altered biotic assemblages. Ecosystem function probably also varies with extent of urbanization, although there are few stream networks in which this prediction has been studied. We examined functional...
There are two objectives of this project: 1) developing biological indicators that characterize urban stressors, and 2) establishing reference conditions for urban systems. Our dataset was assembled from multiple, routine biological monitoring programs in Baltimore, MD/Washington, DC, Cleveland, OH, and San Jose, CA, representing data from approxim...
Changes in catchment land cover can impact stream ecosystems through altered hydrology and subsequent increases in sedimentation and nonpoint-source pollutants. These stressors can affect habitat suitability and water quality for aquatic invertebrates. We studied the impact of a range of physical and chemical stressors on aquatic insects, and teste...
1. The effects of catchment urbanisation on water quality were examined for 30 streams (stratified into 15, 50 and 100 km ² ± 25% catchments) in the Etowah River basin, Georgia, U.S.A. We examined relationships between land cover (implying cover and use) in these catchments (e.g. urban, forest and agriculture) and macroinvertebrate assemblage attri...
The transport and deposition of fine particulate organic matter (FPOM) is an important flux linking upstream and downstream reaches of stream ecosystems. However, few studies have attempted to identify physical controls on particle transport. One reason has been the lack of relatively simple, inexpensive methods. We describe a new technique for mea...
Landscape-scale variation in streamwater phosphorus (P) concentration can affect aquatic food webs. Such var- iation occurs naturally in streams at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica due to spatially variable inputs of geothermally modified groundwater. We examined effects of this gradient on detrital food web components at 16 stream sites....
1. We studied whole-ecosystem metabolism in eight streams from several biomes in North America to identify controls on the rate of stream metabolism over a large geographic range. The streams studied had climates ranging from tropical to cool-temperate and from humid to arid and were all relatively uninfluenced by human disturbances.
2. Rates of gr...
In food webs based on primary production, biomass of organisms within trophic levels can be simultaneously controlled by resources (bottom-up) and consumers (top-down). In contrast, very little is known about top-down and bottom-up control in detritus-based food webs. Here, we tested whether exclusion of macroconsumers (fishes and shrimps) and/or p...
The world's population is concentrated in urban areas. This change in demography has brought landscape transformations that have a number of documented effects on stream ecosystems. The most consistent and pervasive effect is an increase in impervious surface cover within urban catchments, which alters the hydrology and geomorphology of streams. Th...
Leaf decay and fungal biomass accrual was measured for maple (Acer rubrum), tulip-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), and rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) leaf packs in an Appalachian stream over 8 mo. Fades were placed in 2 stream sites along a longitudinal gradient at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in North Carolina: a 1st-order headwater str...
Abstract This paper provides a thorough and up-to-date description of the effects of nutrients on wetland physical, chemical, and biological processes. Wetlands are highly variable and include oligotrophic as well as naturally eutrophic systems. Nutrient additions, therefore, vary in their effects, but generally reduce the aquatic life and recreati...
Abstract This paper describes the effects of nutrient enrichment on the structure and function of stream ecosystems. It starts with the currently well documented,direct effects of nutrient enrichment on algal biomass and the resulting impacts on stream chemistry. The paper continues with an explanation of the less well documented,indirect ecologica...