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Inequitable distributions of environmental burdens including pollution and industrial facilities have been identified along the U.S.-Mexico border. An application of the knowledge generated by both physical and social sciences can benefit effective decision making. Our goal is to bridge the knowledge of the biophysical and socioeconomic processes supporting the provision of ecosystem services in the Upper Santa Cruz Watershed, located at the Arizona-Sonora International border (fig. 1). The development of the Santa Cruz Watershed Ecosystem Portfolio Model (SCWEPM) would help promote scientifically- and socially-sound solutions to water allocation in times of climatic uncertainty.
In cooperation with the US EPA, Southwest Ecosystem Services Project, the USGS is moving forward to begin developing the SCWEPM to create forecasts of responses to ecosystem drivers, including land use change, climate predictions, contaminants pollution, invasive species migrations, economic trends, and environmental hazards that may impact social welfare, human health, and water (fig. 2). Using the USGS EPM as a starting point and drawing from the USGS BEHI datasets, scientists, and study area, we propose to build an interactive web management DSS tool for the Upper Santa Cruz Watershed. We will create or modify existing geospatial layers describing aspects of the criterion for input to models (fig. 3), script interactive geospatial hydrological and biological models into the tool for on-the-fly processing, develop easily-applied weighting mechanisms for friendly graphical-user-interface operability, and provide it online as a prototype for borderland watersheds that have been identified as targets for immediate impacts of climate change.
In accordance with USGS Science Strategy Document (2007) goals, we will develop methodologies with resource management partners that can be used to minimize the effects of climate change, increase understanding of forces that influence the structure and functioning of ecosystems and the goods and services they provide by refining, applying, and interpreting watershed and ecosystem-process models. On June 23 – 25, the USGS and US EPA hosted the "Inaugural Meeting" of The Santa Cruz Watershed Ecosystem Portfolio Model (SCWEPM) in Tucson, AZ. Collaborators and participants included representatives from the Tohono O'odham Nation, the National Park Service, Friends of the Santa Cruz River, The Nature Conservancy, the Sonoran Institute, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, the University of Arizona, Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project, and Arizona State University. We hope to integrate more partners and stakeholders as the model develops.
We intend to deliver predictive modeling and decision-support capability that resource managers can use to forecast the responses of policy and management decisions on land, water, biological, and ecosystem resources because of changes in land use and land cover, natural and engineered infrastructure, and climate. A matrix of criterion will be created to represent current situation and others to portray future scenarios (things that can or cannot be modeled; figure 4). The SCWEPM tool will help to formalize and broaden the scope of the decision-making process by representing ecosystems services equally via economic valuation to be considered more readily in scenario and trade-off analyses. Services will be modeled as geospatial layers and used as input into the SCWEPM. Effects of mitigations, changing climate, and designs for water management in landscapes can be visualized on ecological features and processes in the same settings using the SCWEPM.
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U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey