Landscape-Based Assessment of Human Disturbance for Michigan Lakes

Assessment of lake impairment status and identification of threats’ type and source is essential for protection of intact, enhancement of modified, and restoration of impaired lakes. For regions in which large numbers of lakes occur, such assessment has usually been done for only small fractions of lakes due to resource and time limitation. This study describes a process for assessing lake impairment status and identifying which human disturbances have the greatest impact on each lake for all lakes that are 2 ha or larger in the state of Michigan using readily available, georeferenced natural and human disturbance databases. In-lake indicators of impairment are available for only a small subset of lakes in Michigan. Using statistical relationships between the in-lake indicators and landscape natural and human-induced measures from the subset lakes, we assessed the likely human impairment condition of lakes for which in-lake indicator data were unavailable using landscape natural and human disturbance measures. Approximately 92% of lakes in Michigan were identified as being least to marginally impacted and about 8% were moderately to heavily impacted by landscape human disturbances. Among lakes that were heavily impacted, more inline lakes (92%) were impacted by human disturbances than disconnected (6%) or headwater lakes (2%). More small lakes were impacted than medium to large lakes. For inline lakes, 90% of the heavily impacted lakes were less than 40 ha, 10% were between 40 and 405 ha, and 1% was greater than 405 ha. For disconnected and headwater lakes, all of the heavily impacted lakes were less than 40 ha. Among the anthropogenic disturbances that contributed the most to lake disturbance index scores, nutrient yields and farm animal density affected the highest number of lakes, agricultural land use affected a moderate number of lakes, and point-source pollution and road measures affected least number of lakes. Our process for assessing lake condition represents a significant advantage over other routinely used methods. It permits the evaluation of lake condition across large regions and yields an overall disturbance index that is a physicochemical and biological indicator weighted sum of multiple disturbance factors. The robustness of our approach can be improved with increased availability of high-resolution disturbance datasets.