Stakeholder-Driven Policies and Scenarios of Land System Change and Environmental Impacts: A Case Study of Owyhee County, Idaho, United States

Abstract

While stakeholder-driven approaches have been increasingly used in scenario modeling, previous studies have mostly focused on the qualitative elements, e.g., narratives and policy documents, from the stakeholders, but lack engagement of stakeholders with quantitative inputs. In this study, we conducted workshops with a stakeholder group to integrate the participatory mapping of future policies in the simulation, and to compare the environmental impacts after including the participatory mapping. A land system change model named CLUMondo was used to simulate four scenarios, i.e., Business-As-Usual (BAU), Destroying Resources in Owyhee (DRO), Ecological Conservation (EC), and Managed Recreation (MR), in Owyhee County, Idaho, United States. The InVEST models were used to assess water yield, soil erosion, and wildlife habitat under the four scenarios. The results show that the DRO scenario would decrease shrubland and increased grassland, thus leading to less water yield, more soil erosion, and deteriorated wildlife habitat anticipated through to 2050. On the contrary, the EC and MR scenarios reverse the trend and would improve these ecosystem services over the same time horizon. The stakeholder-driven policies appear to influence the spatial distribution of the land system and ecosystem services. The results help to reach a nuanced understanding of the stakeholder-driven scenarios and highlight the importance of engaging stakeholders in scenario modeling and environmental impact analysis.

A Multi-Objective Scenario Study of County Land Use in Loess Hilly Areas: Taking Lintao County as an Example

“…Adding policy constraints in the land use simulation can effectively limit the expansion of construction land in the region, especially protecting cropland and ecological land in and near the river area, thereby enhancing the credibility of the study. A study in Owyhee County, Idaho, USA, also found that conservation policies improved ecosystem services [62]. Additionally, compared with other studies [57,58,63], through finer land use classifications, this study can identify the multi-objective conflict problem of land use restructuring at the county scale.…”