Assessing hydrological impact of potential land use change through hydrological and land use change modeling for the Kishwaukee River basin (USA).

We connected a cellular, dynamic, spatial urban growth model and a semi-distributed continuous hydrology model to quantitatively predict streamflow in response to possible future urban growth at a basin scale. The main goal was to demonstrate the utility of the approach for informing public planning policy and investment choices. The Hydrological Simulation Program-Fortran (HSPF) was set up and calibrated for the Kishwaukee River basin in the Midwestern USA and was repeatedly run with various land use scenarios generated either by the urban growth model (LEAMluc) or hypothetically.

Long-term impacts of land-use change on non-point source pollutant loads for the St. Louis metropolitan area, USA.

A land-use-change simulation model (LEAM) and a non-point-source (NPS) water quality model (L-THIA) were closely coupled as LEAMwq in order to determine the long-term implications of various degree of urbanization on NPS total nitrogen (TN), total suspended particles (TSP), and total phosphorus (TP) loads. A future land-use projection in the St. Louis metropolitan area from 2005 to 2030 using three economic growth scenarios (base, low, and high) and a long-term precipitation dataset were used to predict the mean annual surface runoff and mean annual NPS pollutant loads in the region.