Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Development of Resilient Water Management Systems

随着人口越来越多地从农村向城市地区迁移，了解城市如何发展具有复原力的水管理系统将继续变得越来越重要。为了了解影响复原力的众多因素，救济和发展组织经常审查适应能力，以评估当代国家和城市应对环境变化增加的能力。该项目将评估使用了几个世纪的水管理系统的适应能力要素之间的关系。这种关系在长期中最为明显，人们可以观察到社区随着人口增长、政治和宗教制度的变化以及几个世纪以来周围环境的变化而经历的变化。在这个项目的过程中，研究人员还将指导本科生和柬埔寨考古学家在各种考古领域的方法和空间分析，响应呼吁，以改善STEM教育。考古案例研究，吴哥，柬埔寨，是中心的高棉帝国超过600年（公元9 - 15世纪）。在此期间，高棉人开发了工业化前世界中最大和最复杂的水管理系统之一。对于这个项目，Klassen女士将首先制定吴哥城市布局变化的年表，以确定随着时间的推移水利基础设施建设的性质和分布。历史、空间和年代数据正在出现，这些数据将被综合成一个全面的和地理参考的清单，列出吴哥景观中所有已知的考古特征。Klassen女士将从这份清单中为各个时间段分配特征，然后确定吴哥城市布局的变化顺序。她将使用地理信息系统分析，从数量和质量上评估适应能力的六个重要要素（系统利用的水量，基础设施投资，人力资本，冗余，资源公平分配和创新），共八个时间段。这六个要素之间的关系和权衡将用于更好地理解是什么使系统具有弹性。此外，将结果与每个时期国家的集中与分散性质进行比较，以确定政治制度的类型是否以及如何影响水管理系统的弹性。

As populations increasingly move from rural to urban areas, understanding how cities can develop resilient water management systems will continue to rise in importance. To understand the multitude of factors impacting resilience, relief and development organizations often examine adaptive capacity to assess the ability of contemporary countries and cities to respond to and prepare for increases in environmental variation. This project will assess the relationship between elements of adaptive capacity of a water management system that was used for centuries. Such relationships are most visible in the long term where one can observe changes that communities experience as population grows, political and religious regimes change, and the environment varies around them over centuries. In the course of this project, the researchers will also mentor undergraduate students and Cambodian archaeologists in a variety of archaeological field methods and spatial analyses, answering the call to improve STEM education.The archaeological case study, Angkor, Cambodia, was the center of the Khmer Empire for over 600 years (9th-15th centuries CE). During this time, the Khmers developed one of the largest and most complex water management systems in the pre-industrial world. For this project, Ms. Klassen will first develop a chronology of change in the urban layout of Angkor, to identify the nature and distribution of water infrastructure construction over time. Historical, spatial, and chronological data are now emerging that will be synthesized into a comprehensive and geo-referenced inventory of all known archaeological features within the Angkorian landscape. From this inventory, Ms. Klassen will assign features to time periods, then identify a sequence of change in the urban layout of Angkor. She will use geographic information system analyses to quantitatively and qualitatively assess six important elements of adaptive capacity (the amount of water harnessed by the system, investments in infrastructure, human capital, redundancy, equal distribution of resources, and innovation) for eight time periods. The relationships and trade-offs among the six elements will be used to better understand what makes systems resilient. Further, the results will be compared with the centralized vs. decentralized nature of the state during each time period to determine if and how the type of political regime impacts the resilience of the water management system.