Assessing climate change impacts on wetlands in a flow regulated catchment: A case study in the Macquarie Marshes, Australia.

Globally wetlands are increasingly under threat due to changes in water regimes as a result of river regulation and climate change. We developed the Exploring CLimAte Impacts on Management (EXCLAIM) decision support system (DSS), which simulates flow-driven habitat condition for 16 vegetation species, 13 waterbird species and 4 fish groups in the Macquarie catchment, Australia. The EXCLAIM DSS estimates impacts to habitat condition, considering scenarios of climate change and water management. The model framework underlying the DSS is a probabilistic Bayesian network, and this approach was chosen to explicitly represent uncertainties in climate change scenarios and predicted ecological outcomes. The results suggest that the scenario with no climate change and no water resource development (i.e. flow condition without dams, weirs or water license entitlements, often regarded as a surrogate for 'natural' flow) consistently has the most beneficial outcomes for vegetation, waterbird and native fish. The 2030 dry climate change scenario delivers the poorest ecological outcomes overall, whereas the 2030 wet climate change scenario has beneficial outcomes for waterbird breeding, but delivers poor outcomes for river red gum and black box woodlands, and fish that prefer river channels as habitats. A formal evaluation of the waterbird breeding model showed that higher numbers of observed nest counts are typically associated with higher modelled average breeding habitat conditions. The EXCLAIM DSS provides a generic framework to link hydrology and ecological habitats for a large number of species, based on best available knowledge of their flood requirements. It is a starting point towards developing an integrated tool for assessing climate change impacts on wetland ecosystems.

Scenario processes for socio-environmental systems analysis of futures: A review of recent efforts and a salient research agenda for supporting decision making.

This paper reviews the latest research on scenarios including the processes and products for socio-environmental systems (SES) analysis, modeling and decision making. A group of scenario researchers and practitioners participated in a workshop to discuss consolidation of existing research on the development and use of scenario analysis in exploring and understanding the interplay between human and environmental systems. This paper presents an extended overview of the workshop discussions and follow-up review work. It is structured around the essential challenges that are crucial to progress support of decision making and learning with respect to our highly uncertain socio-environmental futures. It identifies a practical research agenda where challenges are grouped according to the process stage at which they are most significant: before, during, and after the creation of the scenarios as products. These challenges for SES include: enhancing the role of stakeholder and public engagement in the co-development of scenarios, linking scenarios across multiple geographical, sectoral and temporal scales, improving the links between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of scenario analysis, addressing uncertainties especially surprise, addressing scenario diversity and their consistency together, communicating scenarios including visualization methods, and linking scenarios to decision making.