Designing Wetland Conservation Strategies under Climate Change Jiayi Li, Elizabeth Marshall, James Shortle, Richard Ready, Carl Hershner Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences

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Designing Wetland Conservation Strategies under
Climate ChangeJiayi Li, Elizabeth Marshall,
James Shortle, Richard Ready, Carl
HershnerDepartment of Agricultural Economics and
Rural SociologyVirginia Institute of Marine
Sciences
Introduction Wetland conservation is a major
environmental concern in the Chesapeake Bay
region. Substantial losses due to land
development and other factors have had profound
impacts on the Bays aquatic resources. Major
wetland functions include habitat provision,
water quality improvement, flood protection, bank
stabilization, and sediment control. Current
conservation efforts fail to account for the
impacts of climate change on sea level, which can
affect the success of conservation efforts.

• Cellular Automaton (CA) Model
• CA examines changes taking place purely as a
  function of what happens in the immediate
  vicinity of any particular cell. The land use
  data is mapped into cells, as shown in Figure 5.
• We identify four major drivers that influence
  the development possibility for each undeveloped
  land cell.
• We assign different weight sets to the four
  major drivers to reflect three different future
  land use scenarios compact development,
  dispersed development, and nodal development.

Objective This study develops a methodology for
evaluating public wetlands conservation
investments that takes climate change into
account. We demonstrate the methodology for the
Elizabeth River watershed in Virginia under
plausible sea-level rise and land use scenarios.
We consider a 30-year time period

• Discrete Stochastic Sequential Programming (DSSP)
• We consider two types of uncertain events that
  may affect decisions in our DSSP model.
• - Acquisition of new information about high
  or low sea-level rise (SLR).
• - Knowing the likelihood that an undeveloped
  land parcel would become developed.
• Figure 6 shows how these uncertain events are
  included in a 2-stage decision process.

Fig 3 Elizabeth River Watershed, Virginia

• Methods
• Cost-effective analysis is used to compare two
  wetland conservations strategies
• - Strategy 1 Preserve high-elevation
  undeveloped land adjacent to existing wetland.

Fig 4 Wetland Migration (Titus, 1990)

• - Strategy 2 Relocate wetland to suitable
  areas where land prices are low.
• The cellular automaton (CA) model is used to
  construct a development vulnerability
• index and to project land use changes for the
  study area.
• The discrete stochastic sequential programming
  (DSSP) technique is used to minimize
• the costs of implementing each wetland
  conservation strategy.

Acknowledgement 1. Support is provided by the
Global Change Research Program, Office of
Research and Development, U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (Cooperative Agreement
R-83053301). 2. Steve Graham, Penn State and
Tamia Rudnicky, Virginia Institute of Marine
Science (VIMS) provided GIS data and analysis
assistance. 3. Marcia Bermen, Walter Priest and
Dan Schatt, VIMS gave valuable suggestions.