Advancing the modeling of land use and land cover change impacts on water resources

Land use and land cover (LULC) change is one of the most important drivers of global change and has strong impacts on water resources. Analyzing these impacts in space and time requires appropriate monitoring and modeling approaches. In particular, interactions between land and water resources need to be better represented in modeling approaches to allow for a consistent assessment of impacts. Therefore, it is necessary to move from static to dynamic representations of LULC in hydrologic models. Moreover, modeling of LULC impacts on water resources can be further advanced by coupling LULC and hydrologic models. A coupled modeling approach enables us to consider feedback effects as well as to take management decisions into account. The benefits of a coupled modeling approach are demonstrated by coupling the hydrologic model SWAT with the LULC model CLUE-s for a meso-scale catchment in India. The coupling of the two models allows for a better representation of spatial dynamics and management decisions during a model run. Moreover, by using the example of cropland abandonment, we show the potential of the coupled modeling approach to address topics like the water-energy-food nexus and climate resilience.