Decision Support Systems for Predicting
Ecologic, Economic, Environmental and Hydrologic Impacts of
Alternative Land and Water Use Management Policies and Practices

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Brief Description

     Community planning and environmental boards are often responsible for evaluating proposed changes in land and water use. The aim of this research is to develop and then provide such government agencies with an interactive computer-based technology designed to assist them in carrying out such evaluations. This technology will include models for predicting the economic and ecological impacts of decisions on water and land use practices and policies. To develop this technology, this project must identify and quantify how various land use policies impact surface and groundwater quantity and quality, and how flows and pollutant concentrations affect aquatic and adjacent terrestrial systems. The project must learn and then build predictive models describing how changes in land and water use policies influence socioeconomic activities, local economic development, and tax revenues.

Our immediate goals are to improve the ability to predict the interdependent socioeconomic, terrestrial, hydrological, and ecological processes that define the dynamics of land use changes and their effects on water and associated biota. This capability will be incorporated into a data-driven, interactive, microcomputer-based decision support system. This research is under the direction of a multidisciplinary team that includes a regional economist, four agricultural-environmental engineers, and an ecologist. Work is being conducted closely with town and county planners, and the methods will be tested on a local watershed. The approach and models being developed will be applicable to a variety of watersheds similar to those found in the Northeastern US.

    In the few weeks since this project began, work has focused on the development of the required surface groundwater simulation models for water quantity and quality. This will be an expanded PC-Windows-based Interactive River-Aquifer Simulation (IRAS) model. It will include links to various rainfall-runoff predictive models that consider both the quantity and quality of the runoff. It will have a water quality component that in addition to dissolved constituents, will include the transport of sediment, and constituents attached to sediment. The initial objectives include building a model that accounts for land converted to residential uses since 1970, and then using it to identify areas in the watershed having a high probability for future residential development under various economic growth scenarios. The structure of the ecological components of the simulation model are being developed by expanding a simple system relating macroinvertebrate and fish species to predicted habitat and water quality status. New quantitative information from the surface groundwater simulation model will permit more reliable predictions of the type and health of aquatic communities than were previously possible. Since the level of precision in our ability to model hydrological variables (such as water quantities and qualities over time and space) is far greater than what can be used by ecologists, the use of fuzzy set theory may be helpful in modeling this interface.

    The projectís goal is to develop a model system that will simulate decision options, policy ramifications, and environmental enhancement strategies. The model should provide useful information regarding the design and spatial distribution of conservation incentives, the selection of requirements for development mitigation measures, the comparison of zoning and siting alternatives, and the planning of reserves, greenways, and other forms of natural areas.

    This research will involve the application of this methodology to two watersheds in the Ithaca area in cooperation with the Ithaca City Planning Board and the Ithaca Environmental Laboratory.