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Tamara Wilson

Research Geographer
Email: tswilson@usgs.gov
Office Phone: 650-439-2347
ORCID: 0000-0001-7399-7532
Water shortages in California are a growing concern amidst ongoing drought, earlier spring snowmelt, projected future climate warming, and currently mandated water use restrictions. Increases in population and land use in coming decades will place additional pressure on already limited available water supplies. We used a state-and-transition simulation model to project future changes in developed (municipal and industrial) and agricultural land use to estimate associated water use demand from 2012 to 2062. Under current efficiency rates, total water use was projected to increase 1.8 billion cubic meters (+4.1%) driven primarily by urbanization and shifts to more water intensive crops. Only if currently mandated...
This dataset consists of raster geotiff outputs of 30-year average annual land use and land cover transition probabilities for the California Central Valley modeled for the period 2011-2101 across 5 future scenarios. The full methods and results of this research are described in detail in “Integrated modeling of climate, land use, and water availability scenarios and their impacts on managed wetland habitat: A case study from California’s Central Valley” (2021). Land-use and land-cover change for California's Central Valley were modeled using the LUCAS model and five different scenarios were simulated from 2011 to 2101 across the entirety of the valley. The five future scenario projections originated from the four...
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Projections of 5 coupled scenarios of land-use change and groundwater sustainability for California's Central Coast (2001-2061) - LUCAS-W model
LUCAS-W is a scenario-based simulation model of coupled land use change and associated water demand for California's Central Coast region from 2001-2061. The model is a verison of the LUCAS model, which uses the SyncroSim software framework (Software documentation available at http://doc.syncrosim.com/index.php?title=Reference_Guide), that contains a new coupling with statistical software R (https://www.r-project.org/) to enable dynamic feedbacks between land-use change, resulting water demand, and water availability. The model was parameterized with land-use change and water use empirically estimated from county-scale historic data, as well as results from dozens of local agencies’ groundwater modeling efforts....
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The USGS’s FORE-SCE model was used to produce land-use and land-cover (LULC) projections for the conterminous United States. The projections were originally created as part of the "LandCarbon" project, an effort to understand biological carbon sequestration potential in the United States. However, the projections are being used for a wide variety of purposes, including analyses of the effects of landscape change on biodiversity, water quality, and regional weather and climate. The year 1992 served as the baseline for the landscape modeling. The 1992 to 2005 period was considered the historical baseline, with datasets such as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), USGS Land Cover Trends, and US Department of Agriculture's...
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Mediterranean California’s water use future under multiple scenarios of developed and agricultural land use change
This dataset contains .csv and .tif image files in support of the conclusions published in "Mediterranean California’s water use future under multiple scenarios of developed and agricultural land use change" in the journal PLOS One. We used the USGS's LUCAS model to examine a broad suite of spatially explicit future land use scenarios and their associated county-level water use demand, including the historical (1992-2011) and projected periods (2012-2062) across 40 Monte Carlo simulations.We examined a range of potential water demand futures sampled from a 20-year record of historical (1992-2012) data to develop a suite of potential future land change scenarios from 2012-2062. These scenario simulations include...
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