An Integrated Multi-Model Decision Support Framework for Evaluating Ecosystem-Based Management Options for Coupled Human-Natural Systems

Abstract

Simulation models offer a way to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of alternative community planning scenarios. For example, a community might want to understand how a particular decision-such as expanding an urban growth boundary into lands zoned for agriculture-will result in ecological, economic, and social tradeoffs for various stakeholder groups. This chapter explores the utility of ENVISION, a spatially-explicit decision support framework that integrates various ecological and human systems model "plug-ins" for informing Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) options. While ENVISION already has a reasonably large tool box of such plug-ins, its usefulness could be further extended to address a wider range of community and ecosystem types. We specifically examine how a suite of existing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decision support tools (VELMA, HexSim, CORESET, Coral PF and others) could significantly extend ENVISION's plug-in toolbox for coastal ecosystem EBM, inclusive of terrestrial-marine interactions and restoration goals of coastal communities dependent on marine ecosystem services.

What is it about coral reefs? Translation of ecosystem goods and services relevant to people and their well‐being

“…The FST provides a transparent means to prioritize stakeholders, develop beneficiary profiles, and choose among ecosystem attributes as those of shared importance to the community ( Sharpe and Jenkins 2018 , Sharpe et al 2020 ), prior to identification of metrics. Final ecosystem goods and services metrics can be useful for regulatory purposes to evaluate alternate management actions such as risk assessment endpoints ( Munns et al 2015 ); integrate into other decision support models (e.g., Envision, VELMA; McKane et al 2020 ); compare outcomes of alternative management options on ecosystem services; design restoration and revitalization strategies for cleanup of contaminated sites ( DeWitt et al 2020 ); study resiliency after natural disasters; restore large ecosystems; and even examine different future climate change scenarios on coral reefs.…”

Watershed analysis of urban stormwater contaminant 6PPD-Quinone hotspots and stream concentrations using a process-based ecohydrological model

“…CompTox provides curated values for contaminant solubility, hydrophobicity, partitioning between aqueous and sorbed phases, decay rate, and other properties. These parameters allow dynamic daily simulation of changing hydrological and biogeochemical controls when utilized within a calibrated watershed (McKane et al, 2020;McKane R. B. et al, 2022). Depending on variability in soil matrixes, contaminants can accumulate through cell-to-cell transfers at surface and subsurface flow path convergences and then be transported to stormwater outfalls along streams, estuaries, or other receiving waters.…”

“…To address this need, we applied the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessments (VELMA) ecohydrology model to characterize spatial and temporal patterns of daily and interannual TRWP deposition and associated fate and transport of 6PPD-Q in a highly urban watershed. Longfellow Creek upper watershed (5.54 km 2 ), Seattle, Washington (WA), United States (US) is a well-monitored Puget Sound tributary with high rates of documented coho salmon URMS (Scholz et al, 2011;McKane et al, 2014a;Feist et al, 2017;McKane et al, 2020). Since the discovery of 6PPD-Q as a toxic stormwater pollutant, the Puget Sound region has enhanced focus on stormwater road runoff through investments in contaminant monitoring, containment, and remediation (Puget Sound Partnership, 2023).…”

Improved urban runoff prediction using high-resolution land-use, imperviousness, and stormwater infrastructure data applied to a process-based ecohydrological model

“…VELMA is a spatially explicit ecohydrological model that includes multiple submodels representing integrated environmental components (hydrology and terrestrial biogeochemistry) to simulate the impacts of various stressors on dynamic responses of vegetation, soil, and water [21,22]. VELMA parameters and watershed-scale simulation setup details are described in the 2014 VELMA 2.0 user manual [21].…”

“…Here we developed such a high-spatial resolution framework by leveraging the Visualizing Ecosystem Land Management Assessment (VELMA) model, which has been demonstrated to suitably simulate hydrologic and nutrient transport mechanisms within natural (non-urban) and urbanized landscapes [5,[18][19][20][21][22]. VELMA is a spatially distributed (i.e., grid-based) ecohydrological model that simulates land surface hydrology and terrestrial biogeochemistry to characterize the integrated responses of vegetation, soil, and water resources to multiple interacting stressors and watershed management actions across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales-plots to regional basins, and days to decades [21,22]. The novelty to this ecohydrology modeling approach is leveraging VELMA's ability to simulate dynamic vegetation growth and landscape disturbance along with dynamic fate and transport of water and nutrients upon the surface (including evapotranspiration) presented here.…”