Annual Conference

9:00-9:30 Opening:

Recorded Opening Remard by ABRESO Consortium Leader Dr. Timothy White

9:30-12:30 Session I

A. Drivers for Land Use Change

B. Underlying Mechanism for Water-Soil Interaction i

C. Underlying Mechanism for Water-Soil Interaction ii

13:30-15:45 Session II

D Stakeholder Perceptions i

E Stakeholder Perceptions ii

15:45 -17:30 Roundtable: Conversation between Scientists and Stakeholders – A Reflection on the Critical Zone’s Social-Ecological System Governance to co-creation and co-develop policy recommendation

15:50 – 16:10 Opening

16:10 – 16:50 Roundtable Discussion (10 minutes each) joined by:

Taipei Water Management Office, WRA (台北水源特定區管理局)

The Collectors CoSpace (採集人共作室)

Taiwan Ecological Engineering Foundation (生態工法基金會)

16:50 – 17:30 Q & A

Conference Background: Belmont ABRESO project addresses soil and water sustainability in landscapes undergoing transitions. Management and social-cultural changes create transitions, alter watershed properties (soil and water quality, and related ecosystem services) in a manner that stakeholders may not understand or appreciate. Yet changes affect stakeholders what they want to preserve or change, and their views of land management strategies. To celebrate 2022 World Rivers Day with worldwide aquatic ecosystem enthusiasts, Belmont ABRESO Taiwan team will organize a conference on the 4^th Sunday of September to rally researchers and stakeholders both in Taiwan and abroad and re-direct our scholarly and partitioners' attention on the ecosystem and human health of watershed area under conservation and in transition. We welcome conference papers written either in Chinese or English to contribute to the following four thematic focuses: A. Drivers for land use change, B. Underlying mechanism for water-soil interaction, C. Stakeholder Perceptions, D. Scenarios. Our ABRESO Taiwan study site is located in Fei-tsui Watershed and Pinglin District. Yet we welcome research tackling an array of sustainability challenges in other watershed conservation regions in Taiwan or other parts of the world. ABRESO Project Description: https://sites.psu.edu/abreso/

A. Drivers for Land Use Change

Session Host: Dr. Jr-Chuan Huang (Hydrological Process/Digital Terrain Analysis) National Taiwan University riverhuang@ntu.edu.tw

Land use change has ripple effects across time and space that affect human societies and ecosystem services. For example, conventional farming applies nitrogen (N) fertilizer to soils to increase crop yields, so changing forests to farms typically increases soil N, degrades the quality of groundwater for drinking water, and impairs ecological function of downstream ecosystems. When seminatural pastures are abandoned, a transition back to forest is often accompanied by changes in biodiversity and soil carbon (C) storage. Drivers of land use change vary widely among different case studies. They include: i) changes in biophysical drivers, i.e. those associated with climate change, extreme events, or geohazards ii) economic, regulatory, and technical drivers, i.e. farming systems and practices, commodity values, or environmental regulation; and iii) societal factors that shape the form of urban development (e.g., population growth, economic development, income). These drivers are a starting point for developing contrasting scenarios of social and biophysical changes based on watershed-scale simulations of changing critical zone properties. Development of contrasting narrative scenarios facilitated by experts and stakeholders working together to explore the impacts of land abandonment and land use change can provide insight into the factors driving such changes. In this session, we welcome studies that explore an array of drivers for land use change either theoretically or empirically via case studies worldwide.

B/C Underlying Mechanism for Water-Soil Interaction

Session Host: Dr. Chia-Chun Ho (Intelligent Resilient Water Environment) National Taiwan University of Science and Technoloy cchocv@mail.ntust.edu.tw; Dr. Shao-Yiu Hsu (Prevention and mitigation of hydrological disasters) National Taiwan University syhsu@ntu.edu.tw

The hydrology, hydraulic and water quality of the catchment are closely related to the geology, topography and land use. When precipitation hits the ground, it has three options depending on where it is in its story line. It may return to the air with evapotranspiration, part of it infiltrates when surface water enters the soil to surcharge groundwater, and the other part continue across the land as runoff. In the natural circulation of water, it is often accompanied by the transmission of nutrients. Taking the tea garden in Pinglin area of Taiwan as an example, excessive fertilization may affect the groundwater quality due to the infiltration of nutrients. At the same time, the runoff will also be mixed with fertilizers and flow into rivers and reservoirs, resulting in water eutrophication. However, insufficient fertilization may result in poor tea harvests. Therefore, it is necessary to study the nitrogen and phosphorus transport mechanism of water-soil-tea tree in order to achieve the goal of sustainable land development in the catchment.

D/E Stakeholder Perceptions & Engagement:

Session Host: Dr. Herlin Chien (Citizen Participation/public policy/adaptive governance) National Pingtung University of Science & Technology hchien@mail.npust.edu.tw ; Dr. Sue-Ching Jou (urban policy and governance, urban regeneration and redevelopment）National Taiwan University jouchen@ntu.edu.tw

Due to the information gap and preference heterogeneity between scientists, government regulators and multiple stakeholders in the watershed conservation area, the conventional top-down policymaking to conserve and promote aquatic ecosystem health is not always effectively implemented. Instead, mandatory compliance to overemphasize conservation practice is sometimes resisted and complained by the local users (agricultural user, residential user, commercial user, etc.) whose voluntary cooperation is most needed if the watershed area needs to be sustainably managed and governed in the long term. This session calls for studies to improve our collective understanding on multiple stakeholders’ perceptions of land use change, watershed governance, conservation policy, including Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) or watershed compensation scheme, and their associated impacts on both ecosystem and human health. By doing so, we hope to use the gathered scientific data, different framings proposed by multiple stakeholders and engage stakeholders to better explain and co-create the development of future sustainable watershed management which is more inclusive and in balance with an improved human-nature relationship. To achieve this goal, we also welcome best practice examples of collaborative policymaking in Taiwan or worldwide to encourage stakeholder partnership, co-governance observing principle of subsidiarity and citizen engagement in the field of river or watershed management.

Reference:

• Leach, William D., Neil W. Pelkey, and Paul A. Sabatier. "Stakeholder partnerships as collaborative policymaking: Evaluation criteria applied to watershed management in California and Washington." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management: The Journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management 21, no. 4 (2002): 645-670.

• Iaione, Christian. "The CO‐city: Sharing, collaborating, cooperating, and commoning in the city." American Journal of Economics and Sociology 75, no. 2 (2016): 415-455.

• Hauck, Jennifer, Christoph Görg, Riku Varjopuro, Outi Ratamäki, and Kurt Jax. "Benefits and limitations of the ecosystem services concept in environmental policy and decision making: some stakeholder perspectives." Environmental Science & Policy 25 (2013): 13-21.

• Okumah, Murat, and Ata Senior Yeboah. "Exploring stakeholders’ perceptions of the quality and governance of water resources in the Wenchi municipality." Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 63, no. 8 (2020): 1375-1403.

• Kharel, Gehendra, Omkar Joshi, Ron Miller, and Chris Zou. "Perceptions of government and research expert groups and their implications for watershed management in Oklahoma, USA." Environmental management 62, no. 6 (2018): 1048-1059.

• Kaplowitz, Michael D., and Scott G. Witter. "Agricultural and residential stakeholder input for watershed management in a mid-Michigan watershed." Landscape and Urban Planning 84, no. 1 (2008): 20-27.