Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Tradeoffs between Ecosystem Carbon Sequestration and Water Yield

Abstract

The United States National Forest System supplies much of the nation's drinking water. However, changes in climate, land use and population are stressing the ability of these forests to provide that ecosystem service. Federal land managers are under increasing pressure to increase ecosystem carbon sequestration in an attempt to partially offset greenhouse gases and slow global warming. Unfortunately, the positive relationship between carbon gain and water use in forests, puts the need for water and increased carbon gain at odds with each other. To assess these tradeoffs, a coupled water supply and demand, carbon sequestration, and biodiversity (WaSSI-CB) model was developed. WaSSI-CB was designed to be run with climate, population, and land use change scenarios to examine the interactions between water, carbon gain and biodiversity change across the 2,100 USGS 8 digit USGS Hydrologic Unit Code watersheds that span the lower 48 US. Results from this model using historic climate and landuse data indicated that the greatest increases in water use conservation may be made through improved irrigation practices, that manipulations in forest cover (i.e., massive harvesting) are an impractical way of increasing water supply, and the that the southeastern US has the highest potential for forest carbon sequestration. Biodiversity was calculated under steady state, historic conditions, with the greatest and mammal biodiversity occurring the southern US. The impact of future climate and population change were not included in this paper due to space limitations, but will be presented at the conference.