Stakeholder-designed scenarios to investigate the effect of land use on
water partitioning and high flows in New England
Abstract
Decision makers and water managers throughout New England desire to
understand how development and land-use change, especially under a
changing climate, will affect high flows, flooding, and stormwater. We
use the New England Landscape Futures (NELF) project to demonstrate the
potential for translating participatory scenarios to simulations of land
use and land cover and the resulting effects on streamflow. In addition
to projecting recent trends, four other landscape scenarios were
co-designed through a structured process that engaged over 150
stakeholders and scientists from throughout New England. Daily
streamflows were simulated with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool
(SWAT) to investigate how high flows vary among the scenarios for the
less developed Cocheco River watershed in southeast New Hampshire and
the more urbanized Charles River watershed in eastern Massachusetts. The
hydrologic response of each land-use scenario was simulated for both
historic weather (1999-2017) and downscaled weather for 2049-2067 from
the CCSM 4.0-RCP 8.5 model-pathway from the Community Earth System
Model. Differences among the land-use scenarios led to no differences in
average annual water yield and ET. Loss of forest and increase in urban
area reduces the baseflow contribution to streamflow while increasing
storm runoff. This shift in partitioning did not affect the frequency of
high flows (5% exceedence). The increase in runoff did lead to a
concomitant increase in the average annual maximum flow, and the effect
is larger in the Charles River watershed than in the Cocheco. Under the
future climate, a combination of increased precipitation and decreased
potential evaporation results in increased streamflow relative to the
scenarios modeled with the historic weather. As a fraction of
precipitation, surface runoff remains the same, and baseflow increases.
The frequency of high flows increases, with the 5%-exceedence flow
(under historical weather) being met or exceeded 8-9% of the days.
Annual maximum flows also increased for the future climate, and the
effects of land-use change and climate on annual maximum flows are
comparable. These water-related results fit into a larger framework for
evaluating ecosystem services associated with socially relevant
landscape scenarios.