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Section 404 Permitting in Coastal Texas: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Relationship Between Peak Streamflow and Wetland Alteration

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Abstract

As early as the passage of the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act the U.S. government has sought to protect the nation’s water resources through regulatory tools. While there has been a large amount of research on wetlands and wetland mitigation, very little is known about the impact of Section 404 permitting on water quantity. This research examines the impact of Section 404 permit types on peak annual streamflow in Coastal Texas from 1996 to 2003. Results of cross-sectional time-series regression analyses indicate that all four permit types have positive and significant effects on peak streamflow. These effects also vary by permit type, with Individual permits having the highest per-permit impact on peak annual flow.

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Notes

  1. Land cover does not remain static over time however the CCAP database is the finest temporal dataset available for this scale of analysis. Change in land cover between 1996 and 2001 was calculated and rate of change factor was applied to the years 1997–2000 and 2002–2003 to create imputed land cover variables for those years. Ultimately, this procedure produced no differences in the signs of the regression coefficients or changes in their statistical significance compared to using static land cover.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is based on research supported in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (FP-91661001), U.S. National Science Foundation (CMS-0346673), and Houston Advanced Research Center (10-001). The findings and opinions reported are those of the author and are not endorsed by the funding organizations.

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  1. Department of Marine Sciences, Texas A&M University at Galveston, 200 Seawolf Parkway, 1675, Galveston, Texas, 77553, USA

    Wesley E. Highfield

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  1. Wesley E. Highfield
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Correspondence to Wesley E. Highfield.

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Highfield, W.E. Section 404 Permitting in Coastal Texas: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Relationship Between Peak Streamflow and Wetland Alteration. Environmental Management 49, 892–901 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-012-9832-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-012-9832-7

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