UC Merced

California has diversified landscapes and complex water networks, contributing to its intertwined ecosystems’ relations so that biodiversity conservation and human socio-economic development share close to the same set of water and land resources. Biodiversity is threatened by climate change. Intermediate conservation actions are required and need to be supported by scientific information that minimizes the trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and human socio-economic development.In this doctoral research, I designed a synthesis future-oriented approach that integrates multi-disciplinary methods, namely economic optimization, remote sensing, ecological modeling of species distribution, and systematic conservation plan. With this approach, I aim to help us find the conservation solutions that are good today but also are going to be good in the future climate change. With economic optimization, I modeled the fluctuation in agricultural water and land use across different management and climate change scenarios but also across different water year types that are embroidered by the Mediterranean climate. I also find that the upper bound dual value of the economic optimization model water network can be a good indicator for the conservation of water use. Cost is a critical piece of information for the later systematic compensation planning. I used species distribution modeling to predict species abundance distribution with climate change to represent the change in conservation benefit as a result of species migratory and phenological adaptation to climate change. Land and water opportunity costs under climate were updated based on simulation optimization models. Resulted in species range and cost were used for spatial and temporally explicit, systematic conservation planning. I applied this approach to California’s Central Valley and predicted the weekly ranges of shorebird species of a range of morphological features and conservation status. Water and land opportunity costs were estimated in climate change and historical scenarios. The conservation actions considered in this research are to create dynamic flooded habitats on agricultural lands as a nature-based solution to carbon sequestration, groundwater overdraft, and shorebird conservation. I found that if we navigate the use of environmental flow in a relatively blind way, it will significantly conflict with agricultural production with minimal positive ecosystem benefits. To do it right, we must understand the new hydrological patterns and build more storage to make use of excess flows, particularly in the southern part of Central Valley. Climate change and water conservation management will increase the costs of water used for environmental use. Therefore, I considered an increased cost of water in creating dynamic flooded habitats in the final prioritization analysis by using the economic models’ outputs. Conservation prioritization was created based not only on species' seasonal dynamics but also on varying seasonal costs resulting from timed land use on a cultured landscape of California and a range of water availability across seasons and different water year types. I considered both spatial and temporal hydrological connectivity, which might be even more important for aquatic species of fish and amphibians, and improved conservation efficacy. The intellectual merit of this thesis is synthesizing different metrologies across disciplines and making broader implications for integrated agricultural land use and water management in California for climate change adaptation and ecosystem conservation.