Study Area: Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas

General Description:

The Dallas-Fort Worth study area is located in north-central Texas. Major cities include Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano, Irving, and Arlington. The population in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area has increased 29.3 percent from 1990 to 2000 and was about 5.2 million people in 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). The study area is located in the upper drainage of the Trinity River Basin and overlays the Texas Blackland Prairie (Omernick, 1987), which is underlain by chalks, marls, limestones, and shales of Cretaceous age, and is a rolling to level plains dominated by little bluestem, yellow Indiangrass, sugar hackberry, bur oak, elm, and eastern cottonwood. Land-use is dominated by row-crop, pasture, and rangeland, and urban land use in and around the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Elevation in the study area ranges from about 262 to 886 feet (80 to 270 meters) above sea level (U.S. Geological survey, 2005). The climate is semiarid with mean annual temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.2 degrees Celsius) and mean annual rainfall of 41 inches (105 centimeters)(Daymet, 2005). Most precipitation occurs in the spring and also from summer thunderstorms. Annual surface runoff is about 2 inches (5 centimeters) per year. Surface water in the study area is dominated by reservoirs, intra-basin transfers, diversion of water to municipalities, and wastewater effluent. Smaller streams are generally intermittent. Prairie streams support warm-water biological communities.

Timing of study:

Site selection in 2003, data collection from fall 2003 to fall 2004.

Study design:

Twenty nine sites were selected with drainage basin areas between about 10 to 112 square miles (27 to 291 square kilometers) and had minimal natural variability among them. The land use gradient went primarily from agriculture and grasslands to urban. Sites represented a broad range of urban intensity from low to high.

What urban looks like (maps and pictures)

Publications:

In Progress

Reference:

Daymet, 2005, Numerical Terradynamic Simultion Group: Univeristy of Montana, accessed December 2005, at http://www.daymet.org.

Omernik, J. M., 1987, Ecoregions of the conterminous United States: Annals of the Association of American Geographers v. 77, 118-125 p.

U.S. Census Bureau, 2000, Census 2000 PHC-T-3, Ranking tables for metropolitan areas: 1990 and 2000, accessed January 2006, at http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t3/tab03.pdf

U.S. Geological Survey, 2005, National Elevation Dataset (NED): U.S. Geological Survey, accessed December 2005, at http://ned.usgs.gov.

For more information about the study area http://tx.usgs.gov/trin/