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A Watershed-based spatially-explicit demonstration of an Integrated Environmental Modeling Framework for Ecosystem Services in the Coal River Basin (WV, USA)
Citation:
Johnston, JohnM, Craig Barber, K. Wolfe, M. Galvin, Mike Cyterski, AND R. Parmar. A Watershed-based spatially-explicit demonstration of an Integrated Environmental Modeling Framework for Ecosystem Services in the Coal River Basin (WV, USA). Presented at Fifth Interagency Conference on Research in the Watersheds, Charleston, SC, March 02 - 06, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of this Project is to characterize the ecosystem goods and services production functions and benefit functions that link changes in biophysical features within a community to changes in the social welfare of human populations in the community. These functions are useful individually for formally (i.e., mathematically) expressing the value of individual features of ecosystems, and are particularly useful within integrated decision-support models that holistically link human activities in a community, the effects of those activities on local ecosystems, and consequent impacts to the well-being of people in the community. Whereas humans interact with and appreciate numerous facets of ecosystems, research in this Project will focus on final ecosystem goods and services (FEGS, i.e., those EGS that are directly used by people) as defined and classified by Project 2.1.1 for which the valuation and utility can be most clearly identified. EGS production and benefit functions identified in this project will directly support decision-support tools developed in Theme 1, and be applied in community-scale and national-scale case studies (i.e., as part of the National Atlas).
Description:
We demonstrate a spatially-explicit regional assessment of current condition of aquatic ecoservices in the Coal River Basin (CRB), with limited sensitivity analysis for the atmospheric contaminant mercury. The integrated modeling framework (IMF) forecasts water quality and quantity, habitat suitability for aquatic biota, fish biomasses, population densities, productivities, and contamination by methylmercury in headwater watersheds. The CRB is an 8-digit hydrologic unit watershed facing widespread land use change, and the IMF simulates a network of 97 stream segments using the SWAT watershed model, a watershed mercury loading model, WASP fate and transport model, PisCES fish community model, a fish habitat suitability model, BASS fish community and bioaccumulation model, and an ecoservices post-processer. The application of these models was facilitated by the automated data retrieval and model setup tool D4EM and updated model wrappers and interfaces for data transfers between these models. Baseline predictions of ecoservices are provided for 1990 – 2010. Spin-up of the IMF is also addressed.
