Developing a spatial modeling approach to estimate O/E scores within streams and lakes in the conterminous US (CONUS)
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The USEPA has estimated macroinvertebrate observed-to-expected (O/E) taxonomic richness for several thousand rivers, streams and lakes throughout the continental United States as part of the National Aquatic Resource Surveys (NARS). However, predicting O/E in unsampled rivers/streams and lakes could help local, state, and federal agencies prioritize areas for conservation or restoration. In addition, this measure of aquatic condition is of great interest to economists as it is readily understood by participants in willingness-to-pay-studies. Our main objective is to produce spatial interpolations of macroinvertebrate O/E across the conterminous US that can be used in an economic analysis to estimate the willingness of individuals to pay for incremental improvements in biological condition near them. However, this work raises several methodological questions that have not been addressed at this scale, such as: How best can we develop and apply models to both streams and lakes? How do we communicate the accuracy and precision achieved in the ecological models to support economic analyses? How will the use of regional reference sites in the development of O/E indices affect interpolations at regional boundaries and are there ways to mitigate these differences for economic analyses? In this presentation, we will review the need for such information, review past approaches, and discuss our proposed approach to model O/E for streams and lakes as well as several challenges we expect to encounter.