HR: 13:40h
AN: H43I-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Frontier Lecture in Hydrological Science: Land Use and the Changing Nature of World Water Resources
AU: * Foley, J A
EM: jfoley@wisc.edu
AF: Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin 1710 University Ave., Madison, WI 53726 United States
AB: Historically, land use has mainly been considered a local environmental issue, but it is fast becoming a force of global significance. Worldwide changes to forests and farmlands, coastlines and waterways are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, fresh water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Such changes in land use - including a significant expansion of global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas in recent decades - have also been accompanied by large increases in global energy, freshwater, and fertilizer consumption. All together, these changes in land use practices have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of terrestrial hydrological systems and aquatic ecosystems to maintain clean, reliable freshwater resources, and their accompanying ecosystem services. We now face the challenge of managing "trade-offs" between meeting immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of watersheds and aquatic ecosystems to provide goods and services in the long term. In this presentation, I will discuss the impacts of land use and land cover change on the state of global water resources. In particular, this talk will explore linkages among changing land cover, regional climate patterns, surface hydrological processes, the hydrology of large rivers, and the continued flow of ecosystem goods and services from the large watersheds of the world.
DE: 1632 Land cover change
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
DE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects (4802, 4902)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005