Advancing Land-Sea Conservation Planning: Integrating Modelling of Catchments, Land-Use Change, and River Plumes to Prioritise Catchment Management and Protection
Table 2
Ranges of proportional change in catchment loads of pollutants (DIN and TSS) from ‘natural’ to ‘current’ land-use conditions used to calculate the change factor (CF).
We arbitrarily applied progressively larger CF values, from 0.5 (effectively reducing the importance of the catchment by half) when the estimated increase in loads of DIN or TSS was relatively low (<25%) to 1.0 (maximum importance) for catchments with very large increases in estimated loads of pollutants (>1,000% for DIN and >350% for TSS). Due to high variability in the proportional change in pollutant loads between catchments and pollutants, we assigned different intervals for CF categories for TSS and DIN, in both cases based on a geometric increase, which fitted the distribution of our data.