The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently established the Ecosystem Services Research Program to help formulate methods and models for conducting comprehensive risk assessments that quantify how multiple ecosystem services interact and respond in concert to environmental changes. A major goal is to assess how alternative land use and climate scenarios will simultaneously affect food and fiber production, water quality and quantity, regulation of greenhouse gases, and other ecosystem services. Essential to this goal are highly integrated models that can be used to define policy and management strategies for entire ecosystems, not simply individual components of the ecosystem. In this context, an ideal model is one that (1) can unambiguously link effects to causes by identifying key processes that control ecosystem service tradeoffs, (2) can be applied to a wide variety of ecosystems and regions, (3) can be implemented using readily available data, (4) can efficiently map “bundles” of ecosystem services across wide spatial and temporal scales, and (5) can provide a decision support framework for assessing outcomes of alternative policies and management decisions. We developed an eco-hydrologic modeling framework that aims to meet these emerging risk assessment objectives more closely than other currently available models.
Results/Conclusions
VELMA (Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessments) is a spatially-distributed eco-hydrologic model that links a land surface hydrologic model with a terrestrial biogeochemistry model for simulating the integrated responses of vegetation, soil, and water resources to interacting stressors. Here we describe a proof-of-concept application of VELMA to the H.J. Andrews