Ensuring the long-term sustainability of water resources requires careful stewardship of water for societal uses (i.e. municipal, agricultural, and industrial sectors) and also for the many other benefits that aquatic ecosystems provide to humans. In particular, reservoir fisheries and river ecosystems provide a range of economic, cultural, and recreational benefits. Maximizing the benefits that we receive from water will entail balancing societal uses, reservoir storage, and river flows. Climate change is expected to complicate the challenge of finding a balance among these three dimensions of water sustainability.
To navigate these challenges, stakeholders need frameworks for simultaneously predicting the effects of changing water availability on ecosystems and biodiversity and on societal water needs. This project will enhance an existing spatial planning tool to allow stakeholders to explore how different future scenarios of climate and water use impact the ability of water resources to meet society’s needs, reservoir fisheries, and stream flows in the Red River basin.
Over the last several years, the project team has leveraged previous South Central CASC simulation models and data to build the existing spatial planning tool for balancing societal water needs and stream flows. In this project, the team will extend that work to explicitly model the impacts of water use and climate on fishes in reservoirs and streams. To do that, researchers will 1) enhance the hydrologic components of the model to explicitly represent water elevation, temperature and oxygen in reservoirs, and 2) use a trait-based approach to predict the impacts of those reservoirs’ conditions on fishes. This integrated modeling framework will allow stakeholders to identify water sustainability strategies that are resilient to future climate uncertainty and maximize the potential for balancing societal water needs, reservoir fisheries and stream flows.
