AbstractAdequately managing watersheds requires a comprehensive understanding of how natural and social components of the landscape operate and interact over space and time. Watershed scale dynamic modeling is one of the only practical ways to do this. The goal of this project is to apply a suite of spatially explicit, dynamic modeling tools we have developed and tested using a participatory framework to support ongoing watershed planning and adaptive watershed management efforts in the Northern forest. We will create a decision-support framework and apply it to several case studies identified by stakeholders with interests in the Northern Forestlands. We will focus on the Lamoille River watershed, including the two small adjacent coastal watersheds (Mallets Bay and St.Albans Bay, - the latter regularly cited for water quality impairments). An important output from this project will be the translation of selected watershed planning projects into quantitative estimates of amounts of phosphorus that will be delivered to the Lake. This information is essential to evaluate the likelihood of attaining the new Lake Champlain Phosphorus 'Total Maximum Daily Load' (TMDL) requirements agreed to by state of Vermont and the US EPA. The modeling tools and the integrated framework we develop will be available to help inform other watershed planning endeavors. Researching scalability of models, we will consider how watershed plans can be rescaled from smaller to larger spatial entities and from short-term to long-term plans. ObjectivesThe primary objective of this project is to use the landscape modeling framework as a tool to support ongoing watershed planning and adaptive watershed management efforts in the Northern Forest, using participatory modeling. Specific objectives include the following:
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