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The future midwest North American landscape
Citation:
BRUINS, R. J., E. R. SMITH, M. H. MEHAFFEY, H. SANDER, E. COOTER, S. K. LEDUC, L. Tran, Y. YUAN, M. Rowe, L. Wainger, AND S. Sifleet. The future midwest North American landscape. Presented at EcoSummit 2012, Columbus, OH, September 30 - October 05, 2012.
Impact/Purpose:
The goal of this research is to develop methods and indicators that are useful for evaluating the condition of aquatic communities, for assessing the restoration of aquatic communities in response to mitigation and best management practices, and for determining the exposure of aquatic communities to different classes of stressors (i.e., pesticides, sedimentation, habitat alteration).
Description:
Important changes in land use are occurring in agricultural regions of the United States, but the trade-offs associated with these changes - such as trade-offs among production of crops, provision of amenities such as clean air, clean water, recreational opportunities, and reduction of flooding and climate change - are not well understood or accounted for in national policy or regional decision-making. EPA's Future Midwestern Landscapes (FML) Study is quantifying the benefits that humans receive from nature, also knows as ecosystem services, in the 12 states that comprise the Midwestern U.S. The FML Study is generating alternative future landscapes reflecting two drivers of landscape change - biofuels and conservation practices - and is using models to project how these ecosystem services would change under each scenario. In work completed to date, a "base year" landscape coverage provides a detailed picture of "existing" (2002) natural areas and crop rotations. A "biofuel targets" landscape shows expected increases in corn plantings to meet U.S. corn ethanol blending requirements for the year 2020, thus representing a "business-as-usual" scenario. Work is underway to develop a "multiple services" landscape illustrating a hypothetical policy that modestly increases the land area adopting certain conservation practices, according to an ecological targeting scheme, and requires riparian buffers in new urban development. A new linkage of crop growth and air quality models will show how crop production, plant and soil carbon, bidirectional ammonia flux, air quality and nitrogen deposition would respond to each landscape. A new water quality modeling approach will improve regional estimates of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus loadings to rivers in response to land use changes. Resulting eutrophication changes in Lake MIchigan will be estimated, and new models of wildlife-related recreation and ecosystem rarity will address changes in both supply and demand for recreation and existence (nonuse) services.