The investigation of human responses to changes in the hydroclimate requires advancing our understanding of the interactions between regional climate and water supply, the dynamics of individual and market-level agricultural systems, and the consequences of human decisions for land use and land cover change. Coupled human and natural systems focus on the patterns and processes that link human and natural systems, which are in turn characterized by feedback loops, nonlinear relationships, threshold effects and time lags. Our conceptual coupled model outlines interactions between the human and natural systems resulting from farmer land use, production and investment decisions that impact future temperature, rainfall and streamflow. The numbers in the figure reference a subproject outlined below.