Understanding the effects of land use/land cover and climate changes in the Lower Athabasca River sub-basin, Alberta: An integrated modelling approach

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The Lower Athabasca sub-basin in northeast Alberta contains a large portion of the Athabasca oil sands area. Oil sands operations and environmental changes create concerns for the long-term reliability of groundwater and surface water resources. The sub-basin is characterized by complex relationships between expansive wetland areas, low gradients, and beaver dam effects on channelized flow along with industrial development and the recent fire in the boreal forest surrounding Fort McMurray that considerably transformed the landscape. Understanding the impact of land use/land-cover (LULC) and climate change on water resources over time is critical, but has been confounded so far by traditional modeling approaches. To resolve this problem, the implementation of a unique integrated modeling system that deals with complex landscape level interactions is proposed. It incorporates the physically based, spatially distributed hydrological model MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 with a LULC cellular automata (CA) model that has been extensively tested on the Elbow River watershed in southern Alberta. The goal of this project is to test how, and if, the integrated modeling approach developed for the Elbow River watershed can be successfully applied to characterize the key hydrological processes in the Lower Athabasca River sub-basin and their linkages with LULC and climate change.This research aims to answer the following questions: (i) what is the best CA design to represent the spatial heterogeneity and complex landscape interactions that occur at different scales in the sub-basin? (ii) what are the key driving factors of change and the transition rules required to capture the LULC dynamics of the region? (iii) what is the impact of oil sands operations on water resources according to historical, current and projected use of water? (iv) how can such impact be influenced by scenarios of LULC and climate change over the next decades. The use of a CA model to capture historical and projected LULC dynamics in combination with MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 is unique and allows for the simulation of a variety of scenarios to facilitate decision-making about a wide range of water resource management issues, which can be applied in other watersheds across Canada.