Vulnerability of estuarine systems in the contiguous United States to water quality change under future climate and land-use

Changes in climate and land-use and land-cover (LULC) are expected to influence surface water runoff and nutrient characteristics of estuarine watersheds, but the extent to which estuaries are vulnerable to altered nutrient loading under future conditions is poorly understood. The present work aims to address this gap through the development of a new vulnerability assessment framework that accounts for (1) estuarine exposure to projected changes in total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) loads as a function of LULC and climate change under several scenarios to altered nutrient loads, (2) sensitivity (i.e., how responsive estuaries are to altered nutrient loads), and (3) adaptive capacity (i.e., how the socio-ecological system can use existing resources to reduce the impacts associated with increased exposure). The framework was applied to 112 estuaries and their contributing watersheds across the contiguous U.S., specifically to look at regional variability in estuarine vulnerabil..., The vulnerability framework is composed of three key components: the  exposure (i.e., magnitude and extent of exposure to change-driven impacts), sensitivity (i.e.,  how a system is affected by exposure to hazards), and adaptive capacity (i.e., potential ability and opportunities to adapt or accommodate the combined effects of the exposure and sensitivity of the system). The dataset gives the score for the indicators used in the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
Exposure is defined as the degree to which an estuarine system is projected to be exposed to increased nutrient loading through terrestrial surface water runoff, altered by changes in precipitation and LULC. To compute the exposure,  average changes in TN and TP loads between the historical (1990-2020) and future (2035-2065) periods obtained from STEPLgrid (Montefiore and Nelson, 2022) were calculated annually (∆TN and ∆TP). ∆TN and ∆TP were re-scaled from 0 to 1 for each nutrient using a linear relationship, where 0..., The tabular files can be opened with Excel.
The shapefiles can be opened with any GIS software (e.g., QGIS, ArcGIS, R, Python).Â