Interactions of Landowners′ Land Use Decisions with Flood and Water Quality

Abstract:

Human-induced changes in landscape occurring at an unprecedented rate and spatial scale have significantly altered the hydrological processes. However, due to the complexity of human decision making on land management in response to various socio-economic circumstances, anthropogenic changes in landscape rarely occur homogenously across temporal and special scales, so do the underlying drivers for land management decisions. For this reason and that for achieving more sustainable natural resources management, we develop a cascading integrated assessment model (CIAM) that accounts for dynamic land use characteristics in modeling hydrological variability, heterogeneity in human land management decisions under various socio-economic scenarios, and feedback of hydrological responses to human behaviors. The CIAM consists of two core components: the interactive land-use transition agent-based model (ILUTABM) and the Regional Hydro-Ecological Simulation System (RHESSys). The ILUTABM simulates heterogeneity in land use decisions at parcel levels by differentiating decision making processes for agricultural, urban and forest landowners. A landowner is expected to make decisions given his expected utility with respect to different underlying socio-economic drivers given the landowner category and the characteristics of his landholdings. These attributes of the land include but not limited to the neighboring land use, zoning rules, current use, soil, slope and elevation. The RHESSys is physical-based watershed model that uses a hierarchical spatial framework to simulate runoff, snow, soil and vegetation processes. Here we use the CIAM to examine the impacts of coupled landscape and climate changes on flood and nutrient transport and consequently the impacts of flood and nutrient loadings on human decisions for land use in the Missisquoi Watershed, Vermont.