Monitoring the Effects of Land Development on Stream Dynamics Across the Greater Dayton Area

Date of Award

5-9-2026

Degree Name

M.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies

Department

Department of Earth and Environmental Geosciences

Advisor/Chair

Christopher Sheehan

Abstract

Low-order streams generally comprise the majority of river channel networks and serve as the primary source of water inflow for many drainage basins. Despite this importance, they have historically been understudied relative to their higher-order counterparts. Hydrologic alterations of low-order channels can occur during land-use conversion, especially when prairie, agriculture, and grassland are transformed into impermeable urban spaces. This will likely become increasingly problematic as urban and suburban areas expand over the coming decades. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of land use change on low-order stream hydrology and geomorphology. The urban setting in which this study focuses is in Dayton, Ohio, a once thriving Rust Belt manufacturing hub that recorded a high in population growth around the 1960s, subsequently declining 48% by 2020. Although Dayton has experienced an overall downturn in its population growth due to its proximity to Cincinnati, a city with an increasing population trend, certain sectors on the outskirts of both cityscapes continue to grow. Four Onset U20L-04 HOBO Water Level Data Loggers (WLDL) were deployed within ephemeral streams with upstream watersheds overlapping with Carriage Hill MetroPark (CHM), a conservation area on the northern edge of the Dayton metropolitan area. The deployment site locations all experienced different types of 20th and 21st-century land use change. We collected water level and discharge measurements from June 2025 to March 2026. Then, we coupled these measurements with radar-derived precipitation data to quantify the hydrologic relationships between storm intensity and streamflow. The resulting data and subsequent analyses will be used to assess how local landscape evolution conditions have changed over the last several decades in response to land use change and how they will further vary under future climate change.

Keywords

Stream Dynamics

Comments

OCLC No. 1591639191

Rights Statement

Copyright 2026, author.

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