Management Option Simulation Model (MOSM) and supporting documents

Abstract

MOSM was developed in collaboration with scientists, engineers, and economists from three research universities (Johns Hopkins University, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities and Duluth), and Utah State University), and with a stakeholder group familiar with the watershed (agricultural producers, conservation groups, and members of state and local regulatory agencies). This collaborative development helped to identify relevant and plausible environmental management alternatives to include in the model, and guided development of the model structure, input data, and decision analysis. MOSM simulates movement of water and sediment across a watershed and evaluates the effects of various management option scenarios on sediment loading. It is a reduced-complexity watershed model where many components (i.e., spatial and temporal grids, and number of interacting state variables) and the degree of complexity (i.e., range of physical, chemical, and biological processes) have been reduced to include only those processes essential to represent sediment transport and surface water routing. MOSM is designed to be constrained by the best-available existing information, including stream gaging records, a complete watershed sediment budget, historical trends in the watershed, and independent measures of outputs, such as sediment fingerprinting and a suite of geomorphic change detection outputs.