Non-Market Value Of Watershed Management Enhancements: An Integration Of Hydro-Ecologic And Economic Assessments

The ecosystem services provided by our freshwater systems are fundamentally important to humans. Aside from providing clean water for domestic and agriculture use, our rivers and lakes support basic ecological processes and vital economic services including navigation, fisheries, and recreational opportunities. Improvements in watershed management to enhance these services have been the focus of many conservation endeavors for many years. Quantifying the effects of these improvements in terms of their economic values can provide understanding into the trade-offs between environmental decisions and market activities. This research proposed to develop a framework that integrates hydrologic, ecosystem, and economic assessments to quantify non-market values of watershed management improvements. Three ecosystem services were used as metrics to assess the non-market values of scenario-based watershed management: (1) water clarity, which will be represented by sediment load in the river, (2) nutrient reduction, and (3) fish species richness. We used integrated physically-based watershed, river, water quality, and ecosystem models to quantify the changes in ecosystem services due to scenario-based watershed management schemes. The hydrologic and ecosystem models were developed under current and projected climate change scenarios considering their spatial variability across the watershed. Outputs from the hydrologic and ecosystem models were then used as the basis to design a choice experiment survey to elicit the values that people place on the ecosystem services that are improved. We anticipate that our work will provide significant outcomes that will impact watershed management and the adoption of sustainable agriculture in the watershed. The development of a comprehensive framework that allows integration of climate, watershed hydrology, ecosystem, and economic assessments will facilitate the development of a decision support system to address timely implementation, focused adaptation, and mitigation practices or policies for sustainable agriculture while supporting important ecosystem services.