Spatial and Statistical analysis, integrating research on hazardous chemical waste mixtures in the upper Arkansas River drainage.

Heavy metal pollution from contemporary and historic mining operations is ubiquitous in the West and recognized as one of the most significant environmental problems in Rocky Mountain streams. Six of the 15 sites on the U.S. EPA's National Priority List (Superfund) in Colorado are mining sites (California Gulch, Clear Creek, Eagle Mine, Smuggler Mountain, Summitville Mine, and Uravan Uranium). Heavy metal pollution from these Superfund sites and over 10,000 other abandoned mines is estimated to affect over 2,600 km (1,615 miles) of Colorado streams. Because most of the mining-polluted streams in Colorado have been affected by heavy metals for over 100 years, many of the resident populations of macroinvertebrates have acclimated and/or adapted to heavy metal pollution. However, research has shown that metal tolerant populations and communities of macroinvertebrates are also more sensitive to other biotic and abiotic stressors, including acidification, UV-B radiation, and stonefly predation. This large number of streams polluted by the same class of contaminants within a single ecoregion provides a unique opportunity to investigate the interactions of heavy metals with other stressors.

The primary objective of this multi-departmental project was to determine the spatial association between physical and biological attributes of benthic macroinvertebrates proposed for use as bioindicators and the environmental and geophysical attributes of the Upper Arkansas watershed as well as five other comparative watersheds in the Colorado Rocky Mountain Region.

EHASL participated in this project by developing an ArcView architecture and interface designed to store data by which investigators could quantify disturbance factors and responses at various scalar levels (shown in the table below). Included was an interactive webpage for data management, data display, querying, spatial analysis, and hardcopy map printing. These projects were funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and were one of the components of the multi-departmental NIEHS Super fund Basic Research Project.

SPATIAL SCALE	FACTOR
Channel Level	Hydrologic Variability Variable
	Slope (%)
	Aspect (category 1-9)
	Stream size - Cross Section Area at Bankfull (CSAB)
	Sediment size range (% fines)
Reach (riparian) level	Soils (% each type)
	Lithology (% each type)
	Riparian communities (% riparian, condition and cover)
	Vegetation communities (and cover) - (% each type)
Sub-watershed level	Distribution of mines
	Type of mining in basin
	Lithology (% each type)
	Vegetation Communities (and cover) - (% each type)
	soils (% each type)