Technical Bulletin No. 0776: Scale Considerations and the Detectability of Sedimentary Cumulative Watershed Effects

Cumulative watershed effects (CWEs) result from the overlapping effects of management activities in time or space. The routing and downstream accumulation of sediment from forest management activities is of particular concern because it directly affects key aquatic resources, and these sedimentary CWEs are often the most severe constraints on forest management activities. The prediction and detection of sedimentary CWEs is particularly difficult because of the complex interactions among temporal scale, spatial scale, and measurement uncertainty.