Impacts of human activities and climate change on water resources and ecosystem health in Wolf Bay Basin: A Coastal Diagnostic and Forecast System (CDFS) for integrated assessment”
OBJECTIVES:
a) To reconstruct and characterize historical and current patterns of land use/land cover, water use, climate and hurricanes in the Wolf Bay Basin in the past 30 years and to project changes in land use/land cover and water use under various development scenarios over the next 30 years.
b) To collect and measure several key environmental variables associated with surface and groundwater quantity and quality, and ecosystem (riparian, wetland and stream) health for use in establishing empirical relationships between water quantity and quality to land use/land cover changes, and for calibrating and validating our hydrological and ecosystem models.
c) To develop an integrated model – the Coastal Diagnostic and Forecast System (CDFS) linking models of land use, water use, water quality, watershed hydrology, groundwater, river and estuary hydrodynamics, and ecosystems (upland, riparian, wetland and stream).
d) To conduct an integrated assessment with CDFS for evaluating and predicting how changing human and climate impacts influence surface and groundwater quantity and quality, and further affect the ecological sustainability of water resources and economic well-being of inhabitants and visitors of the Wolf Bay Basin.
e) To establish feedback mechanisms from the ecosystem services and functions studies to socio-economic drivers linked specifically with economic and public policy drivers.