Evaluating Biodiversity Metric Response to Forecasted Land Use Change in the Northern Rio Grande Basin

Abstract

The effects of future land use change on arid and semi-arid watersheds in the American Southwest have important management implications. Seamless, national-scale land-use-change scenarios for developed land were acquired from the US Environmental Protection Agency Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios (lCLUS) project and extracted to fit the Northern Rio Grande River Basin, New Mexico relative to projections of housing density for the period from 2000 through 2100. Habitat models developed from the Southwest Regional Gap Analysis Project were invoked to examine changes in wildlife habitat and biodiversity metrics using five ICLUS scenarios. The scenarios represent a US Census base-case and four modifications that were consistent with the different assumptions underlying the A1, A2, B1, and B2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change global greenhouse gas emission storylines. Habitat models for terrestrial vertebrate species were used to derive metrics reflecting ecosystem services or biodiversity aspects valued by humans that could be quantified and mapped. Example metrics included total terrestrial vertebrate species richness, bird species richness, threatened and endangered species, and harvestable species (e.g., waterfowl, big game). Overall, the defined scenarios indicated that the housing density and extent of developed lands will increase throughout the century with a resultant decrease in area for all species richness categories. The A2 Scenario, in general, showed greatest effect on area by species richness category. The integration of the land use scenarios with biodiversity metrics derived from deductive habitat models may prove to be an important tool for decision makers involved in impact assessments and adaptive planning processes.

Flood regime alters the abiotic correlates of riparian vegetation

“…Space‐for‐time substitution has been used to predict future community trajectories (e.g., Stromberg et al, 1996); however, observational studies such as ours should be applied cautiously because they cannot decouple climate and hydrologic variables from other unmeasured differences among sites. Other factors important in riparian plant communities that we were not able to examine include the amount of snowpack upstream of our sites and subsequent timing of spring run‐off (Perry et al, 2012), edaphic factors such as soil nutrients (Andersen et al, 2014), disturbances fire (Pettit & Naiman, 2007), and both river and land management strategies (Samson et al, 2018). It is possible that some of the relationships we observed between hydrologic variables and vegetation are causal in the reverse direction — for example, plants driving changes in groundwater depth or causing intra‐annual variability in groundwater.…”

Arahan Kebijakan Untuk Mengurangi Dinamika Penggunaan Lahan pada DAS Antokan, Provinsi Sumatera Barat

“…Selanjutnya Abera et al (2020) menambahkan bahwa perubahan penggunaan lahan sebagian besar terjadi pada kawasan hutan lindung, semak, rawa, dan sawah yang berubah menjadi kawasan perkebunan, kebun campuran, permukiman dan industri. Selain itu, Samson et al (2018) menambahkan bahwa dampak negatif dari alih fungsi lahan dari fungsi ekologis menjadi lahan terbangun menyebabkan kehilangan keanekaragaman hayati. Cilliers (2019) menyatakan bahwa dampak negatif dari perubahan penggunaan lahan tidak hanya kehilangan keanekaragaman hayati, namun perubahan tersebut juga akan menimbulkan bencana alam banjir dan longsor.…”