Science team receives grant of $150,000
A coalition of faculty members was recently awarded a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct research on the use of water resources in the Cache Valley area. The purpose of the project is to assess how decisions in water resources management impact the hydrology and ecology of the area and explore further research possibilities.
Michelle Baker, an assistant professor of biology at USU who is part of the team said, “Hopefully the outcome of this project will be a large research proposal to answer questions about water management and planning.”
The members of the group include faculty from the departments of civil and environmental engineering, watershed sciences, environment and society, biology, applied economics and finance, sociology, and one associate professor of mathematics from Humboldt State University, all coming together to assess the issue from different disciplinary angles.
Douglas Jackson-Smith, associate professor of sociology, said the project provides students an opportunity to get involved in cutting-edge research and a chance to develop important team skills. “Being able to work on a collaborative team is a skill that some students are specializing in because they realize there are going to be big opportunities to do that kind of work in the 21st century,” he said.
“Part of what the National Science Foundation is interested in is training students,” Smith said. “That may have been part of why the Foundation picked Utah State for the grant. We said we had graduate students and, conceivably, undergrads who might be interested in this. I’m encouraging all of our partners who are faculty to bring students with them. They can participate as much as anybody. There’s no limit to what people can do.”
Jeffery Horsburgh, a research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, said, “I’m really excited about the project. It’s one of the largest interdisciplinary groups that’s been formed on this campus for water-related research.”
Horsbugh said that one challenge is getting the group to be truly interdisciplinary and that a tendency exists for scientists from different fields to work side by side, but not necessarily together.
Baker said: “In order to work effectively as a team, you have to overcome a major hurdle of speaking the same language. For example, somebody with my background uses empirical data, whereas somebody in a physical science might rely on theoretical models, and we might have very different notions of what a sample is.”
“Our work, to be honest, is not really fully integrated,” Smith said. “It tends to be these guys do their thing, these guys do their thing, I do my thing. We have regular meetings and share, but we’re learning it’s not always a joint effort. Some people are willing to work across those boundaries more than others.”
Baker said the grant gives people the chance to learn about other fields of study and learn to communicate effectively with each other.
Baker said many of the projects that the NFS is funding are interdisciplinary. “The reason for that is that many of the problems that are relevant to science and society are interdisciplinary in nature,” she said. “But while many projects are interdisciplinary, most students are not able to get interdisciplinary training while in school. Say you’re a biology major, you’re not necessarily required to take social science classes. In order to get the depth of knowledge you need, you would have to take classes not in your major, and there’s not that much room unless you want to have a six-year program.”
Baker said USU’s breadth and depth requirements are a step in the right direction for interdisciplinary efforts.
Smith said this project is the first step in a long chain of possible research opportunities for water resources management issues
“Water resources management includes all the decisions that are being made from households and farmers all the way up to the big companies and organizations that manage rivers and dams,” Smith said
“The examples of water resource management we’re interested in are things people are doing to adapt to changes in climate and changes in population,” Smith said. “Examples would include changes in irrigation systems in agriculture that are using water differently and more efficiently. They might involve things like the canal project here in the valley where we take a hundred year old canal that was leaking a lot of its water back into the ground, and replace it with a pipe that won’t leak.”
Smith said that these changes in water management have intended consequences, but that there are also unintended consequences for each change. He said that some of the unintended consequences are problematic.
“There are all these changes,” he said. “The water regime change is going to force people to manage their systems differently, including the dams we use to store a lot of our water, such as Hyrum Dam, Porcupine Dam, Cutler Dam and Bear Lake.”
Smith said that in the future cities are probably going to have to buy their water from farmers. As a result, he said, water rights will change, along with the overall pattern of water use.
Smith said that scientists’ understanding of the relationship between surface water and underground water is also changing. “People haven’t been thinking about the connection between surface water and ground water,” he said. “They’re treated separately as two different water rights, when in fact it’s the same water moving up and down the system. Idaho, because of this problem, has had to rewrite their laws to combine ground water and surface water law to allow for what they call a ‘conjunctive water management,’ the idea that we manage the whole water system, recognizing the connections.”
“If it were only biophysical processes that didn’t involve humans, you could do it without human experts.” Smith said, “But if economics, policy and the complexities of society are part of what drives water and nutrients and things through the system, then we need to get together and try and at least study the water system in this kind of complicated way. That’s what the project is trying to do,”
–robjepson@live.com