Reply to letter on 'Coal-tar-based sealcoated pavement: A major PAH source to urban stream sediments'

摘要

We welcome the opportunity to respond to Kirk O'Reilly's comments with respect to our recent publication (Witter et al., 2014). Below, we provide additional information on the points raised in his letter in the order in which he presents them. First, O'Reilly suggests that the title of our manuscript is misleading, and that correction of the title is important "because of the controversy concerning the role of refined tar pavement sealers (RTS) in urban sediments." Here, we review the results of our manuscript that led us to choose that particular title. First, we used a geographic information system (GIS) to quantify six land-use metrics associated with urbanization at three spatial scales. Next, we tested correlations between these six (x 3) urban land-use metrics and ∑PAH_(12) in stream sediments from 35 study sites with mixed land-use features.