Applying Ecological Principles to Land-Use Decision Making in AgriculturalWatersheds

摘要

The Ecological Society of America on sustainable Land Use has put together a setof ecological principles and guidelines to help in land-use decision making. The practical application of these principles and the associated guidelines to planning efforts in real landscapes will require the development and use of strategies and tools to translate them into specific sets of land-use practices (Riparian buffers, floodplain and wetland restorations, etc) and ways to place these practices effectively on the landscape. In this chapter, we discuss the use of future scenarios coupled with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based evaluative models as a methodology for effective land-use planning. We demonstrate the application of this method to explore alternative futures for two agricultural watersheds in the U.S. Cornbelt.