The Impact of Future Land Use Scenarios on Runoff Volumes in the Muskegon River Watershed Deepak K. Ray • Jonah M. Duckles • Bryan C. Pijanowski Received: 31 March 2009 / Accepted: 5 July 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract In this article we compared the response of surface water runoff to a storm event for different rates of urbanization, reforestation and riparian buffer setbacks across forty subwatersheds of the Muskegon River Watershed located in Michigan, USA. We also made these comparisons for several forecasted and one historical land use scenarios (over 140 years). Future land use scenarios to 2040 for forest regrowth, urbanization rates and stream setbacks were developed using the Land Transformation Model (LTM). Historical land use information, from 1900 at 5-year time step intervals, was created using a Backcast land use change model configured using artificial neural network and driven by agriculture and housing census information. We show that (1) controlling the rate of development is the most effective policy option to reduce runoff; (2) establishing setbacks along the mainstem are not as effective as controlling urban growth; (3) refores- tation can abate some of the runoff effects from urban growth but not all; (4) land use patterns of the 1970s produced the least amount of runoff in most cases in the Muskegon River Watershed when compared to land use maps from 1900 to 2040; and, (5) future land use patterns here not always lead to increased (worse) runoff than the past. We found that while ten of the subwatersheds con- tained futures that were worse than any past land use configuration, twenty-five (62.5%) of the subwatersheds produced the greatest amount of runoff in 1900, shortly after the entire watershed was clear-cut. One third (14/40) of the subwatersheds contained the minimum amount of runoff in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when forest amounts were greatest and urban amounts relatively small. Keywords Land use change modeling  Surface water runoff  Policy Impacts Introduction The distribution of land use influences the hydrology of watersheds across a variety of spatial and temporal scales (Leopold 1968; Harbor 1994; Mo ¨lders and Ru ¨haack 2002; Pijanowski and others 2002a; Tang and others 2005a; Tang and others 2005b). Agricultural and urban dominated landscapes increase runoff compared to a landscape that is in its natural state (Leopold 1994; USEPA 2000; Tong and Chen 2002; NRC 2008). The increased runoff carries with it nutrients (e.g., nitrogen and phosphorus) from farm fields (Carpenter and others 1998) and contaminants from urban activities (USEPA 1983; Wayland and others 2002; Wayland and others 2003; Fitzpatrick and others 2007). Increased runoff can also lead to more frequent or intense floods (Bhaduri and others 2000; Booth and others 2004) and alter the apportionment of water to wetlands and groundwater (Mitsch and Gosselink 1993). Nutrient rich runoff from agriculture is considered to be the primary cause of eutrophication of surface water bodies and the expansion of dead zones (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008), which negatively impacts sensitive biological organisms, such as fish and aquatic invertebrates (Wang and others 1997; Cifaldi and others 2003; Allan 2004). D. K. Ray  J. M. Duckles  B. C. Pijanowski (&) Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA e-mail: bpijanow@purdue.edu Present Address: D. K. Ray Institute on Environment, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA 123 Environmental Management DOI 10.1007/s00267-010-9533-z