Workshop: The Cadillac Desert 25 years later, at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis

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Intellectual Merit"The year 2011 will mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (1986, Penguin Books). In this book Reisner dissects the politics, economics and ecological folly of large water projects in the American West and suggests that Western (US) civilization as we know it will collapse due to ailing water management"sedimentation within large reservoirs, water shortages in urban areas and soil salinity reclaimed agricultural bread baskets. Much of Reisner's evidence is journalistic (e.g., expert opinion). We seek funding for a pair of workshops aimed at identifying the appropriate scientific data and analytical tools necessary for rigorously evaluating Reisner's journalistic apocalypses.Specifically, we will convene two organizational workshops in which we accomplish two goals: 1) collating data & identifying rigorous analytic approaches that would contribute to a regional synthesis of the hydrologic, geomorphic, economic, agricultural and ecological health of large Western water projects, and 2) writing a policy forum piece summarizing existing datasets"and most importantly identifying data gaps and research needs to complete this regional synthesis. This planning workshop will be held at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis, and will form the basis for future working groups at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis and the incipient John Wesley Powell Center for Integrated Science (an incipient USGS think tank being designed in the spirit of NCEAS). Our roster of workshop participants includes hydrologists, geologists, ecologists, agricultural scientists, economists and lawyers (see Roster below). Thus, we hope to develop an agenda for the proposed regional synthesis with input from multiple fields of science and policy.Broader Impacts"The planned workshops would lead to synthesis of publicly accessible databases that could be used in future analyses of the broad scale impacts of reclamation in the Western US.B-