Date of Award
3-26-2015
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Applied Science
First Advisor
John Bush
Abstract
Several databases of national scale were compiled to develop a database of reservoir morphological parameters including, but not limited to shoreline development index, index of basin permanence, development of volume and other descriptive parameters based on established morphometric formulas (see Appendix 1 for a list of morphometric formulas). The compilation of the reservoir morphological database (RMD) developed a comprehensive parameter set including those from input datasets and other parameters not contained in the original datasets. The RMD contains 3,873 publicly accessible reservoirs which were analyzed through the use of parametric and non-parametric statistics to determine if significant differences, based on reservoir morphology and location existed between major river basins. When a significant difference was identified using a Analysis of Variance or Kruskal-Wallis Test, a parametric Tukey-Kramer HSD Test or non-parametric Steel-Dwass test was used to identify the major river basins which were significantly different. Morphological parameters calculated during the compilation of the Reservoir Morphology Database (RMD) were used to classify reservoirs in the Pacific Northwest to determine if morphological parameters yielded the same results as those obtained through the analysis of measured nutrients in two ecoregions (Western Forested Mountains and Xeric West) in the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Using a 47 reservoir dataset from Vaga et al. (2006), morphological parameters responsible for the most variance in the dataset were identified through principal component analysis. The four principal components were used as input for cluster analysis. Cluster analysis results were used in discriminant function analysis to examine reservoir clusters a posteriori. In addition, Reservoir Morphology Database was joined with the National Lake Assessment of the United States Environmental Protection Agency to assess nutrient levels and overall reservoir condition in major river basin 5. The joined databases were used to determine if patterns exist based on condition classification and reservoir morphological parameters. Seventy-four reservoirs in the combined RMD-NLA database were assessed and a survey of the new dataset was conducted to determine if reservoir health is dependent on reservoir morphology.
Recommended Citation
Rodgers, Kirk Douglas, "Assessing Reservoir Morphology Using GIS, National Databases, and Statistical Analysis" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 559.
https://research.ualr.edu/etd/559
