People, Land, Water, and Fish in the Chesapeake Watershed

Population growth in coastal regions of the United States and around the world is expected to continue long into the foreseeable future. Such growth has the potential for significant adverse impacts on sensitive aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Managing and mitigating these impacts will require data driven methods, models, and tools that capture the interaction between human and natural systems. Towards these ends, the National Center for Smart Growth (NSCG) has developed an integrated modeling suite for the Chesapeake Bay region, which integrates a land use, transportation, mobile and building emissions, and a land cover model. This suite is able to model interactions among complex socio-economic systems and estimate impacts on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from both buildings and mobile sources. There is however, a need to expand this suite to address impacts on other natural resources including water quality and aquatic ecosystems in the Chesapeake Bay. This project aims to extend the NCSG’s existing modeling suite by linking water quality and aquatic ecosystem models developed at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science, Horn Point Laboratory. By pioneering such transdisciplinary model integration, the proposed project advances the science of model integration and provides an example that can be replicated in sensitive coastal regions around the world.