Future land-use related water demand in California

Abstract

Water shortages in California are a growing concern amidst ongoing drought, earlier spring snowmelt, projected future climate warming, and currently mandated water use restrictions. Increases in population and land use in coming decades will place additional pressure on already limited available water supplies. We used a state-and-transition simulation model to project future changes in developed (municipal and industrial) and agricultural land use to estimate associated water use demand from 2012 to 2062. Under current efficiency rates, total water use was projected to increase 1.8 billion cubic meters (+4.1%) driven primarily by urbanization and shifts to more water intensive crops. Only if currently mandated 25% reductions in municipal water use are continuously implemented would water demand in 2062 balance to water use levels in 2012. This is the first modeling effort of its kind to examine regional land-use related water demand incorporating historical trends of both developed and agricultural land uses.

Future Scenarios of Land Change Based on Empirical Data and Demographic Trends

“…Orchard removal was simulated in the model to reflect the maturation of perennial crops and their subsequent removal following Wilson et al (2016). Orchard removal in California occurs at approximately 25 years, on average (Kroodsma & Field, 2006) as crop productivity declines.…”

“…comparison of land cover and land use classifications). It is important to note, however, that other implementations of the LUCAS model have been validated in a more exhaustive fashion (see Wilson et al, 2016;).…”

“…Land change scenario research has grown in the last two decades with global (Carpenter & Pingali, 2005;Moss et al, 2010;Nakicenovic & Swart, 2000), multinational (Rounsevell et al, 2006), national (Martinuzzi et al, 2015;Radeloff et al, 2012;Sleeter et al, 2012;Wear, 2011), and regional (Gude et al, 2007;Swensen & Franklin, 2000;Wilson et al, 2016) land change scenarios now available. Scenario analysis is useful for identifying alternative plausible outcomes based upon varying scenario assumptions, management strategies, or predetermined targets.…”

Reshaping the Sustainable Geographical Pattern: A Major Function Zoning Model and Its Applications in China

“…With the development of research on sustainability, land use sustainability based on an understanding of ecosystems has become the focus for optimizing the geographical pattern. A particular area of interest has been the development and improvement of predictive simulation models, such as the agent-based model (Matthews et al, 2007;Yuan et al, 2017), the cellular automata model and its evolved models based on grid neighborhood relationship analysis (Grinblat et al, 2016;Van Vliet et al, 2017), or the dynamics of land system model and state-and-transition simulation model based on analyses of changes in land system structures and spatial configuration succession (Wilson et al, 2016;Daniel et al, 2016;Najmuddin et al, 2017). Using these simulation models, it is possible to construct rational scenarios for different sustainability objectives, such as maximizing economic effects (Wu et al, 2012), minimizing pollutant emissions or environmental impacts (Bohnes et al, 2017;Degraeuwe et al, 2017), prioritizing ecological security (Brunner et al, 2017;Eitelberg et al, 2016), limiting climate change and carbon emissions (Anaya-Romero et al, 2015;Prestele et al, 2017), as well as for other sustainability scenarios, such as water resources (Proskuryakova et al, 2018), agricultural production (Chaudhary et al, 2018;Krasa et al, 2010;Van Vliet et al, 2017), or environmental protection (Najmuddin et al,2017;Zarandian et al, 2017).…”

Integrating continuous stocks and flows into state‐and‐transition simulation models of landscape change

“…In the STSM approach, space is represented as a set of discrete spatial units, time is represented in discrete steps and the change in discrete state of each spatial unit over time is modelled as a stochastic process. Examples of questions for which STSMs have been developed include forest management (Costanza, Terando, McKerrow, & Collazo, ; Daniel, Ter‐Mikaelian, Wotton, Rayfield, & Fortin, ), rangeland management (Provencher, Frid, Czembor, & Morisette, ) and LULC change (Daniel et al., ; Wilson, Sleeter, & Cameron, ).…”