W3 Seminar: Modeling the impacts of land use and climate change to coastal foodwebs and fisheries

Details

Speaker:
Holden Harris, Researcher, UF IFAS Nature Coast Biological Station

Title:
A journey down the watershed-to-estuary continuum: Modeling the impacts of land use and climate change to coastal foodwebs and fisheries

Abstract:
In this seminar, we’ll journey along the “watershed-to-estuary continuum” to examine how upstream changes in land use and climate ultimately impact estuary foodwebs, fisheries, and the people who depend on them.

Our first stop will be an examination of case studies for changes observed in Gulf of Mexico estuaries, where we’ll pull ashore to examine an updated conceptual model of how water quality links upstream and downstream components. Through real-world examples, we’ll see how changes in water quality can lead to the collapse of foundational species, damage ecosystem functioning and services, and major stakeholder conflicts.

Our primary voyage will dive into research from cross-disciplinary researchers across UF to develop an end-to-end modeling framework of the Suwannee River estuary and watershed. This cross-disciplinary framework linked a basin-scale hydrology model (SWAT–MODFLOW), a data-statistical Estuary Linkage Model, and a spatial-temporal dynamic foodweb model (the Suwannee River Estuary Model; SREM). With these linked models, we simulated 30 future land use and climate scenarios that were co-developed with stakeholders.

We’ll dedicate time to the ecological modeling leg of our journey, specifically exploring how we linked the SREM to downstream hydrological drivers and applied it to simulate population and community changes under future scenarios. In particular, we’ll consider the relationship of nutrients and phytoplankton: how these both drive the primary productivity in the system and shade out seagrasses, which provide critical habitat to many species.

As we return to dock, we’ll reflect on how our approaches can improve the predictive capacity of modeling forecasts, explore ecological and socioeconomic trade-offs, and inform management decisions related to water resources and coastal resilience.