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

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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.