Linking Land Use to Inland Lake Ecosystem Service Values

Abstract

Since the passing of the Clean Water Act, many efforts have been taken and regulations imposed to protect the nation’s surface waters. Yet water quality issues linger in the United States due to impacts from agriculture, land use change and urban development, also called non-point source pollution. Simultaneously a growing population with increasing development, food, and energy demands continues to accelerate land use change, further exacerbating nutrient loading into freshwater bodies. Therefore decision makers and stakeholders need accessible tools for understanding the tradeoffs inherent to land use decisions and downstream water quality. Using the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s Ecosystem Services framework we develop three discrete, spatially explicit, models, connecting the impacts of upstream land use changes to downstream inland lake water quality, and from there determine the consequences on local property values. These models were developed to require limited inputs using readily available data in an effort to make them accessible to policy and decision makers. The first model, a Phosphorus Loading Model, uses a spatial hierarchy approach and was developed with data from the Upper Mississippi River watershed. The second model, or Lake Tropic State Index Model, also developed using data from the Upper Mississippi River watershed, is a variation of the LakeMab model with outputs translated to Carlson’s Trophic State Index. The third model, a Property Value Model, uses a hedonic pricing method and fixed effects approach and was derived with data from Michigan and Minnesota. We find that as hypothesized, an increase in the Trophic State of a lake decreases property values in close proximity to the lake. Lastly in order to assess the predictive capacity of the models in concert, they were applied to a future Michigan land use scenario for business-as-usual from 2000 to 2030.