Citation:

Kuhn, A. AND J. Copeland. Strengthening resiliency in coastal watersheds: A web-based GIS map viewer decision support system. Sixth Interagency Conference on Research in the Watersheds, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, July 23 - 26, 2018.

Impact/Purpose:

Healthy and resilient coastal watersheds are essential to human well-being and environmental health. A resilient watershed is one that can adjust to stresses and disturbances while still being able to provide valuable ecosystem services and functions, such as clean and plentiful water, flood protection, and essential habitat. Coastal watersheds and communities are experiencing the combined effects of increasing threats from development and climate change. To strengthen ecological and economic resiliency, these communities need to address these threats and make decisions that will minimize risk and help protect, maintain, and restore important ecosystem services. This research provides a basis for informed decision making, and adaptive management techniques and tools, to both maintain our healthy waters and to improve degraded systems.

Description:

To promote and strengthen the resiliency of coastal watersheds in the face of climate change and development, ecological outcomes as well as socioeconomic issues need to be considered. An integrated assessment framework is being developed to help watershed managers, coastal communities, and other stakeholders strengthen coastal resiliency by identifying and prioritizing conservation and restoration efforts within coastal watersheds. This framework is linked to a desktop and web-based decision support system (DSS) incorporating ecological integrity principles with ecosystem services (ES). The DSS tools operate within a geospatial platform, allowing for spatially-explicit analysis of individual ecological units and their associated ESs at multiple scales, and provides web-based and mobile applications (tablets and smart phones) developed for a range of users from technical users/stakeholders to the general public. The DSS tools allow for the evaluation of both ecological integrity and ESs of key functional processes, components and elements of watershed integrity relative to the location within the watershed (e.g. headwater streams, flood plains, riparian condition, coastal wetlands, etc.). The web-based map viewer DSS enables stakeholders to integrate a watershed perspective into their decision making at multiple scales. This coastal watershed resiliency DSS can be used to make decisions for: 1) prioritizing protection and restoration of upland and riparian habitat for water quality and mitigating non-point source stressors; 2) reducing flooding risks by identifying opportunities to restore flood plains and riparian zones increasing aquatic connectivity for habitat and flood resilience; 3) planning for sea level rise adaptation, marsh migration and marsh hydrology restoration; and 4) optimizing green infrastructure to reduce nutrients and non-point source pollutants. These DSS tools are unique in that they integrate ecosystem services and ecological integrity with science-based decision making, allowing managers to consider ecological outcomes as well as economic and social issues when making important decisions within their watershed.

Record Details: