A model relating water quality, vegetational structure and urbanization in the San Jacinto River Basin.

The study was initialized to test the hypothesis that available information was sufficient to predict the relation between amount of urbanization and the quality of the water in the watershed of the San Jacinto River Basin. Chemical water quality measures are the published and unpublished records of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unpublished records of the Houston Water Department provided portions of the Biological Water Quality measures. Predictor variables included soil, weather, population characteristics, and estimates of vegetation type and urbanization obtained from aerial photographs. Factor, discriminant and canonical correlation analyses were used for data reduction. Two models were attempted.