CNH: Coupled Climate, Cultivation, and Culture in the Great Plains: Understanding Water Supply and Water Quality in a Fragile Landscape

淡水是农业、工业、住宅开发和美国经济其他方面的核心，为社会提供重要的生态系统产品和服务，并维持栖息在水生生态系统中的生物群的健康。现有的淡水资源正受到日益不可持续的土地使用和用水做法的挑战。淡水供应的分布、丰富程度和质量无疑也将受到预测的气候变化和多变性的影响。除非在未来对景观进行积极管理，否则维持水生系统提供的生态系统货物和服务的现有水平将是不可能的。 与淡水有关的最紧迫的环境挑战是如何制定和执行可持续的、以科学为基础的战略，以适应气候变化、土地使用变化和人类发展的其他后果。 为了应对这一挑战，我们将开发一个综合的机制模型，明确说明人类景观的相互作用。我们的耦合人文景观模型结合了大气，陆地，水生和社会过程之间的联系和反馈，以预测气候变异，气候变化，土地利用和人类活动对水资源的潜在影响，在北美中部大平原地区的几十年到百年尺度。由于极端的气候变化、密集的用水和土地使用，美国的这一地区长期存在水质和水量问题。 此外，该区域的社会经济系统面临着人口急剧变化、土地保有权集中、依赖高度可变和有限的供水、经济不确定性以及对自上而下的政府监管的强烈文化抵制等挑战。这一地区的人类和自然系统都依赖充足的淡水生存，但脆弱，受气候波动的影响迅速而严重，在自然或人为驱动的气候情景下可能面临灾难。在该项目的前三个组成部分，我们开发和交互耦合机制模型的三个系统控制供水和水质？水系统、水生生态系统和人类系统。在第四个研究部分中，这三个系统模型以两种方式集成。首先，我们使用一个基于代理的决策模型来评估wholesperturbation（水文系统，水生生态系统，人类系统）的响应来自历史气候数据和降尺度的气候预测的气候变化情景。其次，我们使用政策优化模型来确定最有效的战略，以实现可持续发展的文化背景下适当的。这项研究将通过提供工具和框架来指导政策制定和激励措施和法规的实施，以确保中部大平原及其他地区耦合水文，生态和人类系统的可持续性，从而为社会带来好处。我们的研究有可能在几个方面改变支持水可持续性工作的科学。具体而言，我们的研究将：（a）提高我们将气候模型输出转化为更容易理解和相关的天气尺度事件的能力;（B）更好地了解土地所有者如何以及为什么做出用水决策;（c）对现有生态数据进行空间上明确的、流域尺度的综合，以了解气候变化和流域变化如何影响河流景观尺度的生物多样性，（d）促进了解气候变化将如何与一系列其他压力因素共同作用并加剧这些压力因素，从而影响湿地的功能;（e）建立一个可用的政策优化模型，帮助各国政府实现社会可接受和可实现的水可持续性。这些进展将直接有助于经济上重要的农业系统、生物上重要的生态系统、城市人口聚集和清洁水供应的可持续性。

Freshwater is central to agriculture, industry, residential development and other aspects of the US economy, provides essential ecosystem goods and services for society, and maintains the health of the biota that inhabit aquatic ecosystems. Existing freshwater resources are being challenged by increasingly unsustainable land use and water use practices. The distribution, abundance and quality of freshwater supplies will undoubtedly also be affected by projected climate change and variability. Unless landscapes are managed proactively in the future, sustaining even the present level of ecosystem goods and services that aquatic systems provide will be impossible. Among the most pressing environmental challenges related to freshwater are how to formulate and implement sustainable, science-based, strategies to adapt to climate variation, land use change, and other consequences of human development. To address this challenge, we will develop an integrative mechanistic model accounting explicitly for human-landscape interactions. Our coupled human-landscape model incorporates linkages and feedbacks among atmospheric, terrestrial, aquatic, and social processes to predict the potential impact of climate variability, climate change, land use, and human activity on water resources at decadal to centennial scales in the Central Great Plains region of North America. This part of the United States has longstanding water quality and quantity concerns resulting from extreme climate variability, intensive water uses and land uses. Furthermore, the regional socio-economic system is challenged by dramatic population shifts, concentration of land tenure, dependency on highly variable and limited water supplies, economic uncertainty, and strong cultural resistance to top-down government regulation. Both human and natural systems in this area depend on adequate freshwater for survival, but are fragile, quickly and dramatically affected by climate fluctuations, and potentially facing disaster given either natural or anthropogenically-driven climate scenarios. In the first three components of the project, we develop and interactively couple mechanistic models of the three systems controlling water supply and water quality ? the hydrosystem, the aquatic ecosystem, and the human system. In the fourth research component, these three system models are integrated in two ways. First, we use an agent-based decision model to evaluate wholesystem (hydrosystem, aquatic ecosystem, human system) response to climate variation scenarios derived from historical climate data and downscaled climate projections. Second, we use policy optimization modeling to identify the most effective strategies to achieve sustainability within a culturally appropriate context. This research will produce benefits to society by providing tools and frameworks that will guide policy formulation and implementation of incentives and regulations to ensure the sustainability of coupled hydrological, ecological, and human systems in the Central Great Plains and beyond. Our research has the potential to transform the science supporting water sustainability efforts on several fronts. Specifically, our research will: (a) improve our ability to translate climate model outputs into more understandable and relevant weather-scale events ; (b) produce a better understanding of how and why landowners make water-use decisions; (c) develop a spatially-explicit, landscape-scale synthesis of existing ecological data to understand how climate changes and watershed alterations impact riverscape-scale biodiversity, (d) facilitate understanding of how climate change will act in conjunction with and exacerbate a range of other stressors to impact the functions of wetlands, and (e) produce a usable policy optimization model to help governments move towards societally acceptable and achievable water sustainability. These advances will directly contribute to the sustainability of economically important agricultural systems, biologically significant ecosystems, urban population clusters, and clean water supplies.