Connecting the ecological-economic dots in human-dominated watersheds: Models to link socio-economic activities on the landscape to stream ecosystem health

We present an interdisciplinary modeling framework to investigate how human socio-economic activities influence the spatial pattern of urbanization, and how consequent changes in land use affect water quality and stream ecosystem condition. The framework is composed of three submodels considering (1) the social and economic structures based upon a social accounting matrix, (2) land use change and urban sprawl based upon a binary logit regression, and (3) stream ecosystem condition in the catchment area based upon the NAWQA (National Water Quality Assessment) dataset. We applied our integrated model to Dutchess County, New York, USA, as a case study. Our study, in spite of its limitations and uncertainties, demonstrates the importance of a quantitative holistic approach in linking human and natural systems and estimating tradeoffs between economic benefits and environmental quality.