Abstract:
Water quality degradation from agriculture, stormwater and other non-point sources are of great concern in the United States. Watershed management is generally recognized as the most practical and efficient way to improve water quality and other environmental indicators while maintaining regional economic viability. Watershed management is a decision-making process that integrates biophysical sciences, socioeconomic information, and local knowledge. Integrated watershed management (IWM) has become a social movement for solving water and related natural resource problems in the United States and worldwide. The presentation will briefly review the U.S. environmental policy toward watershed management and present an IWM framework that has four components: (1) a collaborative institutional structure; (2) a watershed alliance; (3) a spatial decision support system (SDSS); and (4) a multi-tier extension/outreach, education, and research program. Emphasis will be placed on SDSS and its applications in evaluating economic and environmental risks and tradeoffs, and effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of management measures. A SDSS typically incorporates biophysical models that simulate the biological and physical processes of runoff and pollutant generation and transport under different land use and management conditions in the watershed, economic/behavioral models that capture the social, economic, and political processes for selecting best management practices and final watershed management plan, and a geographic information system that facilitates the manipulation and visualization of spatial data and modeling. The presentation will also discuss several new opportunities for research in watershed management practices and how the framework will be applied in the research projects recently funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Geological Survey, and Environmental Protection Agency. Applications of SDSS in other areas such as air pollution control and impact assessment of climate change will be also discussed.

Brief Biography of Dr. Qiu
Dr. Zeyuan Qiu joined NJIT in January 2002 and currently is Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science. He also holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the School of Management at NJIT. He has his Ph.D. in agricultural economics with an emphasis on natural resource and environmental economics from University of Missouri-Columbia. His research focus is on management alternatives and environmental policies that control nonpoint source water pollution. He publishes extensively in water resource management, agricultural, resource and environmental economics journals. His research interests include non-market evaluation of natural resources, environmental policy analysis, integrated watershed management, environmental risk analysis and integration of biophysical simulation, economic modeling and geographic information systems for environmental management. His recent research focuses on modeling and evaluating the interactions between land and water resources, evaluating the technical, social, economic and institutional factors that affect protection and preservation of hydrologically sensitive areas in landscapes and their policy implications for watershed and stormwater management and smart growth in environmentally fragile rural-urban interfaces, and adaptively managing agricultural ecosystem for future climate and land use changes.