Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID FL_2024_Kaplan

Impacts of Land Use and Climate Change on Coastal Hydrology, Ecology, and Economics

Institute: Florida
Year Established: 2024 Start Date: 2024-09-01 End Date: 2025-08-31
Total Federal Funds: $28,068 Total Non-Federal Funds: $52,230

Principal Investigators: David Kaplan

Project Summary: Human-induced changes in ecosystems (e.g., water withdrawals and fisheries harvest) create economic benefits in the short term but may create longer-term stressors that reduce the quality of natural resources and long-term sustainability. Additionally, coastal environments are influenced by a changing climate, which can alter distributions of plants and animals in response and alter coastal food webs. Combined, these stressors represent substantial direct and indirect impacts on ecosystem services to society like fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism on which coastal economies depend. This project will apply climate, watershed, and ecological models to understand how changes in climate and watershed land/water use influence food webs, fisheries, aquaculture, and nature-linked economic drivers of a tourism economy. The project will outline the implications of a range of future climate and land/water use scenarios that are expected to influence coastal food webs and fisheries in a Gulf of Mexico estuary, focusing on the Suwannee River estuary.