Ecological Landscape Modeling: science tool towards ecosystem restoration and sustainability

The Ecological Landscape Modeling framework is one of the modeling tools used in the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER.  We briefly describe the modeling framework and two example applications - one in the Florida Everglades and one in southeast Spain. The overall program goal is to develop and share a better understanding of the biological, chemical, and hydrologic interactions within and among ecosystems of a landscape mosaic, incorporating aspects of social drivers of landscape management. With stakeholder acceptance of the model, it can be applied to predict the relative benefits among future scenarios – involving water management alternatives, effects of climate change, and/or effects of socio-economic changes on our natural resources.   The recent application of the Everglades Landscape Model (ELM) to evaluate hydro-ecological performance of an Everglades restoration project is briefly presented, showing that water quality should not be considered a constraint on (at least) the first phase of the central Everglades "Decompartmentalization" project.  With collaborators from the Observatory for Sustainability in Spain, we are developing an EcoLandMod application to  help explore sustainable water and land use practices in the Mar Menor watershed of the Segura basin in southeast Spain, and present some of our initial analyses of land use change in the region, planning for model refinement to consider socio-economic drivers of water management and land use change in the region.