S. Kyle McKay's research while affiliated with University of Georgia and other places

... Water may be allocated equitably, distributed equitably, and even accessed equitably, but if people are unable to derive benefits from it, the end result is not social equity. So, water equity should be judged by the final situation of people, and the distribution of the totality of benefits from water (Peña 2011). Irrespective of the region in an IWS situation, the consumers mostly secure their water supply through storing water during the time of supply. ...

... Two papers in this special series (Kaushal et al. 2022) demonstrate the need and value of early, meaningful stakeholder engagement in restoring urban streams and mitigating stream degradation. Scoggins et al. (2022) build on both the experiences of organizers, facilitators, and participants in the place-based case studies of the SUSE5 meeting and the authors' years of professional experiences to articulate a vision for how we can elevate the role of community stakeholders in urban stream restorations. Importantly, their vision involves working to concurrently restore the ecological integrity of the stream ecosystem and repair racial and socio-economic inequities suffered by communities living around the stream. ...

... However, the assumption made here that variation from natural conditions can be expected to be detrimental to native species is both intuitive and well-founded (Poff and Zimmerman, 2010). Additionally, current interest in instream flows is likely to elucidate flow-ecology relationships, including potential thresholds of human alteration to aquatic systems (Freeman et al. 2022). Thus, laying the framework for hydroecological risk assessment now could guide research and application in the near future, as hydroecological understanding and predictive capabilities increase. ...

... This study has several important limitations, partly due to the short time frame of study planning and implementation that was necessary to address the urgent question of how people were using UGS during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic; the timeliness of these results enabled us to share them with the NYC Mayor's Office of Climate Resiliency (MOCR) Rapid Research and Assessment (RRA) series (Kyrkjebo et al., 2021) for consideration in COVID-19 response planning. Our recruitment method was employed to receive responses rapidly, with the tradeoff of obtaining a relatively large but biased sample in a short time period. ...

... Implementing e-flows effectively requires considering the social, political, and economic factors (i.e., local/cultural water use, knowledge, and traditions; public and political support; funding, etc.) in concert with traditional biophysical aspects (i.e., hydrographs, flow-ecology relationships, etc.; Arthington, Kennen, et al., 2018;Jackson et al., 2015). However, despite this recognition of the need to incorporate social, political, and economic factors in e-flows frameworks, integration is still lacking (Anderson et al., 2019;Chappell et al., 2020). In water-limited systems, the challenge of addressing these factors is exacerbated because it involves balancing complex trade-offs between supporting freshwater ecosystem function through e-flows while not disrupting societal water needs. ...

... Across the United States there are millions of culverts at road-stream crossings, allowing 18 for safe transport across waterways and flood management (Martin 2019, McKay et al 2020. 19 ...

... A large interagency study of streams within the Lake Superior Basin of Minnesota developed a classification system (Cai et al. 2015) that was used to compute environmental flow statistics (Herb et al. 2015a) and develop models (Herb et al. 2015b) to examine changes to stream communities based on predicted climate and landscape changes in Minnesota (Herb et al. 2015c). In addition, McKay et al. (2019) used modeled flow data to develop flow-ecology relations for streams in the Minnesota River Basin and applied relations to six future land-use scenarios. Finally, Poff and Allan (1995) found significant relations between hydrologic factors computed from measured streamflow data and fish assemblage data collected in Minnesota and Wisconsin that could not be explained by zoogeographic constraints; of the nine sites in Minnesota, seven were part of the Minnesota River Basin in southern Minnesota. ...

... In the past, ground penetrating radar technology has been widely used in root character detection to understand the growth status of vegetation, including thick-root system structure, thick-root diameter, thick-root biomass and thick-root volume (Hruska et al., 1999;Wu et al., 2014;Ohashi et al., 2019), confirming the feasibility of using GPR technology to detect roots. Thus, using GPR technology to detect root systems and estimate the mechanical function of a root system on slope reinforcement has promising application prospects (Butnor et al., 2003;Raz et al., 2013;Zhu et al., 2014;Butnor et al., 2016;Simms et al., 2017). ...

... Multivariate network analysis, unlike standard species richnessbased multifunctionality methods that aggregate measures of ecosystem functions (Bradford et al., 2014), allows us to trace and investigate each relationship to the level of individual species, traits, or functional groups. Such transparency helps to reduce the risk of the phenomenon called "the black box" that is often used as a metaphor in the context of ecological research where the internal workings of the systems are not clear and cannot be readily understood (Herman et al., 2019). The transparency of connections as presented in our multivariate network analysis helps explaining the complexity behind ecosystem multifunctionality and can promote the use of ecosystem multifunctionality framework among decision-makers. ...

... Evaluating the efficiency of these 4 actions for improving community involvement in urban stream restoration could lead to improved outcomes. Omission of any actions, or foregoing the engagement of strong community stakeholders, may compromise the integrity of community or stream restoration outcomes (Crawford et al. 2017). ...