The human population in the southeastern United States has grown roughly 40% faster than the rest of the nation over the last six decades, a trend that is projected to continue over the next 60 years. This growth will put extreme stresses on numerous ecological, social, and economic systems. For example, it is estimated that by 2060 the demand for clean water in the southeastern United States will increase by 40%, impacting both human populations and biodiversity. Concurrently, wetland ecosystems are some of the most altered and impacted systems worldwide, a fact that has greatly reduced their ability to provide both basic ecosystem services (clean water, healthy fisheries, etc.) and disaster mitigation. To serve a new partner based project (The Wetland Forest initiative-WFI), we explored how to best maintain and restore the services provided by healthy wetland forests in order to improve resilience across scales (watersheds, municipalities, and local communities) in the southeastern United States. We created model based metrics for biodiversity, social factors, and threats to wetland forests. From these metrics, we were able to create a complete prioritization strategy and to compare spatial patterns across different prioritization schemes.
Results/Conclusions
Values from the complete prioritization model (including all 3 metrics), varied widely across the region. Watersheds that contain wetland forests of highest prioritization value include the Black Warrior—Tombigbee, Alabama, Yazoo, Lower Mississippi-Helena, Atchafalyaya-Vermillion, Apalachicola, Savannah, and the Lower Pee Dee. Biodiversity and social metrics displayed largely distinct patterns, but did have some areas of high concordance. The threat metric is more similar to biodiversity prioritization patterns, suggesting that future threats may impact the biodiversity of wetland forests more than the social and economic services they provide. Combining a multitude of data sources and prioritization structures provides the Wetland Forest Initiative valuable dataset to help establish future priorities and focal areas.