Earth Obervation and Modelling of Ecosystem Services in the Welland River Catchment

River catchments provide a host of ecosystem services that are important to human wellbeing (Bagstad et al. 2013). Understanding how land use change affects the resilience of ecosystem services of catchment systems under changing climatic conditions is extremely important for decision making. Focusing on the Welland catchment, this studentship aims to develop a method of ecosystem services assessment that can evaluate the trade-offs and synergies between different ecosystem services associated with land use and climate change scenarios by using Earth Observation (EO) data, scenario modelling and the InVEST ecosystem services assessment tools.
A growing number of tools allow a range of ecosystem services to be assessed on regional scales in order to support policy makers (Crossman et al. 2013). InVEST is one such tool; capable of analysing and valuing the provision of ecosystem services under various land cover scenarios (Swetnam et al. 2011). InVEST uses deterministic models based on land cover maps from EO, digital elevation models and other environmental parameters to provide spatially explicit outputs on the provision of ecosystem services (Bagstad et al. 2013).
The provision of the five ecosystem services will be analysed for the future land cover scenarios as well as a business-as-usual scenario, under a high and a low greenhouse gas emission scenario from IPCC AR5.
The project has 3 stages: First, a high-resolution land cover map of the catchment in its current state will be produced using new Sentinel-2 data at unprecedented 10m spatial resolution, allowing detailed river bank mapping for the first time. The map will also be resampled to coarser spatial resolutions of 30m and 90m to assess how spatial scale affects uncertainty in ecosystem service assessment. Second, the provision of 5 key ecosystem services will be analysed for the catchment in its current condition.
Research questions:
• How can water retention in different land cover types and terrains be valued as a flood protection ecosystem service?
• How strong are the trade-offs and synergies between the 5 ecosystem services under different land use and climate scenarios?
• What impact do global climate trajectories have on catchment-scale land use strategies to maximise ecosystem services?