May 11, 2016 - RACC IAM Mediated Modeling Workshop

2016 RACC IAM Mediated Modeling Workshop

Climate Change, Land Use Patterns and Their Impacts on Missisquoi Bay’s Blue Green Algae Problem

May 11th, 2016 8:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Davis Center - Livak Ballroom, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT

A Workshop for Vermont’s Water Quality Managers and Regional Planners

Workshop Overview:
Results from Research on Adaptation to Climate Change's (RACC's) regional climate down scaling, water sensor, hydrological, land use modeling endeavours conclude that climate change drivers are very likely to exacerbate the BGA problems in shallow bays like Missisquoi Bay, as well as deeper bays like Mallett’s Bay Bay. RACC has designed an advanced computer computer simulation model that integrates land use, hydrology, and lake dynamics has been developed, allowing decision makers an opportunity to envision alternative futures for the Lake Champlain Basin. Given the State of Vermont’s recent total maximum daily load (TMDL) plan and passage of Vermont’s Clean Water Act a deeper understanding of the relationship between climate change, land use development and BGA blooms is needed.

In this mediated modeling workshop, a small group of invited stakeholders was asked to compare alternate visualization and communication approaches for climate change and land use change scenarios developed in the (RACC) cascading Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) to the broader watershed management community. A multi-criteria evaluation approach to compare alternate scenarios was collaboratively developed and tested during the workshop and used to inform RACC’s ongoing efforts to create useful decision support tools for the water quality and land use management networks of Vermont.

Stakeholders at the half day workshop to learned about the RACC’s IAM, saw demonstrations of the IAM outputs, and begin to lay out how different scenarios generated from the IAM can be evaluated based on a set of weighted criteria to be initially determined by workshop participants.