CNH-L: Linking Land-Use Decision Making, Water Quality, and Lake Associations to Understand Human-Natural Feedbacks in Lake Catchments

世界各地的人们极大地受益于淡水湖提供的关键服务，如饮用水、娱乐和渔业。然而，人类活动可能导致污染和有害藻华的增长，使人们赖以生存和享受的湖水退化。这可以产生强烈的动机来改变行为。例如，公民驱动的湖泊协会往往是为了应对水质恶化而形成的，并且在推动土地管理和政策变化方面变得越来越有效，从而大大改善了湖泊环境。本项目考察了美国三个不同湖泊系统中土地利用、湖泊水质和当地社区之间的联系。从这些湖泊系统中获得的见解将反过来为美国东北部和中西部数千个其他湖泊的人类-自然系统动力学研究提供信息。对这些关系和反馈的理解将有助于制定有效的计划和政策，以保护和提高湖泊水质。该项目调查了湖泊集水区人类和自然系统之间联系的性质和程度。该项目将开发一种新的耦合框架，将基于过程的人类和自然系统模型联系起来，以追踪土地利用决策对湖泊生态系统养分通量的影响；代表水文和湖泊过程如何将营养负荷转化为人们所重视的水质指标的变化；并确定水质变化如何通过影响财产价值和公民团体的集体行动来反馈到人类决策中。对于美国东北部和中西部三个不同的集水区，该项目通过得出描述人类-自然系统动力学的关键驱动因素以及这些驱动因素之间关系的基本管理变量来探索这些联系。这些结果为一套统计方法提供了一个综合的基础，这些方法将用于扩大和外推结果，以代表大陆尺度梯度的各种湖泊集水区。这些相互补充的活动将产生对大规模人类-自然系统动态的见解，扩展科学理解，以加强决策，以保护湖泊提供的宝贵自然系统。

People around the world benefit greatly from the critical services provided by freshwater lakes, such as drinking water, recreation, and fisheries. However, human activities can contribute to pollution and the growth of harmful algal blooms that degrade the lake waters that people rely upon and enjoy. This can generate a strong incentive for behavioral change. For example, citizen-driven lake associations often form in response to deteriorating water quality, and are becoming increasingly effective in driving changes in land management and policies that greatly improve lake environments. This project examines the linkages between land use, lake water quality, and local communities in three contrasting U.S. lake systems. Insights from these lake systems will in turn inform the study of human-natural system dynamics across thousands of other lakes throughout the northeastern and midwestern U.S. An understanding of these relationships and feedbacks will help inform the development of effective programs and policies to protect and enhance lake water quality.This project investigates the nature and extent of linkages among human and natural systems in lake catchments. The project will develop a novel coupling framework that links process-based human and natural system models to trace the effects of land-use decisions on nutrient fluxes through lake ecosystems; represent how hydrological and limnological processes transform nutrient loads into changes in the water quality metrics valued by people; and determine how water quality changes feed back into human decision making by affecting property values and collective action by citizen groups. For three contrasting catchments in the northeastern and midwestern U.S., the project explores these linkages by deriving essential management variables that describe the critical drivers of human-natural system dynamics and the relationships between those drivers. These results provide an integrated foundation for a suite of statistical approaches that will be used to scale up and extrapolate the results to a diverse set of lake catchments representative of continental-scale gradients. These complementary activities will generate insight into broad-scale human-natural system dynamics, extending scientific understanding to enhance decision making to protect the valuable natural systems provided by lakes.