Collaborative Research: WSC-Category 3: Climate and Population Change and Thresholds of Peak Ecological Water: Integrated Synthesis for Dryland Rivers

生态系统为人类社会提供广泛的服务。 美国西南部河岸生态系统的服务源自干旱土地上的水以及物理、生物和人类过程网络。人类通过地表水转移、筑坝、地下水开采和土地利用变化的影响，使西南河流发生了显着变化。该项目旨在了解生态系统服务如何随着人口变化和气候变化而向生态系统抽取或添加水而发生变化。 该项目将研究生态系统服务的价值如何随着这些系统可用水量的减少和增加而变化。目前的假设是，一旦脱水，水文条件的恢复将导致生态系统服务和价值水平低于最初在这些生态系统中发现的水平。 利用现有的脱水和恢复数据将为了解河岸系统中生态系统服务的价值如何随水文和生物条件而变化提供一个强大的库。 然后，该知识库将用于了解这些系统如何响应这些系统中的变化驱动因素。进一步了解自由流动的河流系统中物理、生物和经济过程的相互作用，将更好地为更受控制和受人类影响的系统（例如筑坝河流或大量农业改道的河流）的管理提供信息。 由于该项目将预测未来人口变化和气候变化的潜在影响，因此将这些努力迅速转移到决策领域非常重要。该项目的团队由联邦、州和地方利益相关者组成。与这些利益相关者的互动将确保这项研究具有相关性，并且可以快速应用于现实世界。 这种互动还将让学生和博士后研究人员接触到地球、生态系统和经济科学领域的潜在职业道路。

Ecosystems provide a wide variety of services to human societies. The services from riparian ecosystems in the Southwest United States derive from the presence of water in a dry land and a web of physical, biological and human processes. Southwestern rivers have been significantly altered by human impacts through surface water diversions, damming, groundwater extraction and impacts from land use change. This project seeks to understand how ecosystem services change in response to extraction or addition of water to ecosystems due to population change and climate change. The project will look at how the value of ecosystem services changes in response to decreases in water availability and to increases in water availability to these systems. The standing hypothesis is that once dewatered, restoration of hydrologic conditions will result in a lower level of ecosystem services and value than was originally found in these ecosystems. The utilization of existing data on dewatering and on restoration will provide a robust library of understanding of how the value of ecosystems services in riparian systems change in response to hydrologic and biological conditions. This library of knowledge will then be used to understand how these systems might respond to drivers of change in these systems. Further understanding of the interaction of physical, biological and economic processes in free flowing river systems will better inform management in more controlled and human affected systems such as dammed rivers or rivers with large amounts of diversion for agriculture. Since this project will project the potential effects of future changes in population change and climate change, it is important that these efforts be transferred quickly to the decision-making realm. This project's team incorporates federal, state and local stakeholders. Interaction with these stakeholders will ensure that this research is relevant and can quickly be applied in the real world. This interaction will also expose students and post-doctoral researchers to potential career paths across the earth, ecosystem and economic sciences.