HR: 08:15h
AN: B31A-02 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: Integrative Regional Studies in the Mississippi Basin: Investigating the Effects of Land Use / Land Cover Change on Land and Water Resources
AU: * Foley, J A
EM: jfoley@wisc.edu
AF: Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin 1710 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53726 United States
AB: Over the last two hundred years, much of the Mississippi basin has been converted from forest, savanna and grassland to mosaic of agricultural and urban areas. Furthermore, technological changes -- especially those dealing with agricultural practices like fertilizer use -- have also had a widespread affect on environmental systems in the basin. Taken together, the massive transformation of land cover and agricultural land use practices have had a tremendous effect on the hydrological, biogeochemical and ecological processes occurring within the region. This transformation of the basin has a significant impact on human welfare and that other of other species, primarily through changing the distribution of ecosystem "goods and services" produced there. Here we present results that examine how large-scale changes in land use and land cover of the basin may have affected: (i) large-scale water balance and hydrology; (ii) water quality, especially nitrate concentrations; (iii) ecosystem productivity and carbon storage; and (iv) agricultural yield. In this study, we use a combination of process-based ecosystem models (for both natural ecosystems and agricultural systems), large-scale hydrological routing models, and detailed historical land use and climatic datasets. By comparing the response of different environmental processes to combinations of land use and climatic drivers, we may examine the underlying "resilience" of these ecosystems -- and how they may respond to environmental changes. Furthermore, we examine the tradeoffs between ecosystem goods and services -- such as a potential balance between increasing crop yields and decreasing water quality -- on a regional scale. Such regional-scale integrative studies are only now in their infancy. But they represent a framework for exploring the complex interactions between human societies, local landscapes, and regional environmental processes. Such "place-based" integrative studies should be compared to other regions of the world as well -- to see whether more general lessons about ecosystem resilience and human-ecosystem vulnerability may be developed.
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting