CASCaDE:
Computational Assessments of Scenarios of Change for the Delta Ecosystem
This
is the CASCaDE Project web site. Here you will find the original proposal and supplemental material which was submitted in
response to the
California
Bay-Delta Authority Science Program 2004 Proposal Solicitation.
The project was funded and officially began March 1, 2006.
The CASCaDE project comprises an approach for determining how multiple drivers of
environmental change would interact to change ecosystems targeted for
restoration by CALFED. CASCaDE is aimed not at predicting
the future, as that is impossible, but at building an understanding of
how the ecosystem might respond to a few plausible scenarios of change.
Design
of this study is built from hypotheses that: (1) California's hydrology
will change during the 21st century in response to global warming; (2)
ecosystem structure and function will respond to
changes in California's water supply, population, land use, sea level,
constructed habitats and storage-conveyance facilities, and potential
levee failures; (3) sufficient information is available to project
plausible scenarios of change in each of these forcings; (4) climatic,
hydrologic, hydrodynamic, water-quality, geomorphic and ecosystem
processes are linked in the Bay-Delta-River-Watershed system, and thus
models to project future conditions there must also be linked; and (5)
strategic planning by CBDA will benefit from mechanistic,
ecosystem-scale projections of future forcings and responses, posed as
plausible scenarios of system change.
We
are developing, modifying, and linking numerical models of key processes to explore
likely BDRW responses to plausible future external and internal
changes. The cascading effects of changes under these scenarios will be
followed as they propagate from the climate system to watersheds to
river networks to the Delta and San Francisco Bay. The resulting linked
modeling system will provide a scenario evaluation capability that may
be used subsequently (in follow-on projects) to assess a variety of possible management
approaches to accommodating the projected changes.
Progress Reports
Other Documents
Original Proposal
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