CNH-L: The Dynamics of Water Supplies, Land Use, and Disadvantaged Communities

这个跨学科项目将分析地表水和地下水供应、农业用地决策和农村弱势社区经济福利之间的复杂关系。美国一些最具生产力的农业区受到不可持续的地下水开采的威胁。这使得大土地所有者和处境不利的社区极易受到个人和农业使用地表水供应意外短缺的影响。这些地区在经济和水安全之间面临着艰难的权衡。该项目将确定和量化农业地区供水可持续性与经济生产力之间的反馈，并将加强对基础设施和监管决策的支持，从而有助于提高这些社区的稳健性和复原力。该项目将产生将地表水供应与土地利用和社会经济信息相结合的模型，以开发可用于管理和规划的未来情景。这些模型将由利益攸关方和决策者的参与性参与提供信息，这将有助于改进决策支持工具，并根据情景分析结果促进不同群体之间的沟通。该项目的更广泛影响将侧重于帮助当地弱势社区参与水资源治理，包括制定“水学校”，以增加来自代表性不足群体的K-12学生参与科学和政策问题。该项目将为研究生和本科生提供跨学科的研究教育和培训，他们将参与研究和社区参与活动的各个方面。该项目将产生的知识可以更好地为农村地区的农业管理决策、它们对水资源消耗的影响以及减轻伴随这些环境变化而来的弱势社区不公平现象的方法提供信息。该项目的研究目标是开发一个耦合的水文和土地利用模型，以说明自然系统和人类系统之间的反馈，包括利益相关者对干旱恢复力的看法，以及制定适应策略，这些策略将使用反映利益相关者偏好的综合模型进行测试。模型开发将需要整合通常单独处理的组成部分，包括降雨径流过程、地下水流动和污染物运输，以及农业种植决策，所有这些都会影响地表水和地下水储存的管理。参与式建模过程将使利益攸关方参与进来，告知模型的假设、不确定性、模型的开发和分析工具，从而形成一种透明的方式，将地方知识与科学数据结合起来，从而产生有效的政策行动。最后，我们将利用合作博弈论的方法来评估适应性策略的价值，以理解具有冲突偏好的利益相关者之间的权衡。虽然该项目将重点关注加州中央山谷的图拉雷盆地，该地区体现了农业生产广泛、供水有限和大量弱势社区的挑战，但该项目将为美国其他面临类似经济和水安全之间艰难权衡的地区提供新的见解和方法。本项目由美国国家科学基金会自然与人类系统耦合动力学（CNH）项目资助。

This interdisciplinary project will analyze the complex relationships between surface and groundwater supply, agricultural land use decisions, and economic wellbeing in rural disadvantaged communities. Some of the most productive agricultural regions in the United States are threatened by unsustainable groundwater pumping. This leaves large landowners and disadvantaged communities highly vulnerable to unexpected shortages in surface water supply for personal and agricultural use. Regions such as these face difficult tradeoffs between economic and water security. This project will identify and quantify the feedback between water supply sustainability and economic productivity in agricultural areas and will enhance support for decision making regarding infrastructure and regulation, thereby helping to improve the robustness and resilience of these communities. The project will yield models that integrate ground and surface water supplies with land use and socioeconomic information to develop future scenarios that can be used for management and planning. The models will be informed by participatory involvement of stakeholders and policy makers, which will help improve decision-support tools and advance communication among different groups based on the findings from the scenarios. The broader impacts of this project will focus on assisting local disadvantaged communities participate in the governance of water resources, including the formulation of "Water Schools" to increase the participation of K-12 students from underrepresented groups in science and policy issues. The project will provide interdisciplinary research education and training for graduate and undergraduate students who will be involved in all aspects of the research and community engagement activities. The project will generate knowledge that can better inform agricultural management decisions in rural areas, their impacts on water consumption, and approaches for mitigating the inequities in disadvantaged communities that can accompany these environmental changes.The project's research objectives are the development of a coupled hydrologic and land use model to illustrate the feedback between the natural and human systems, the inclusion of stakeholder perspectives on drought resilience, and the development of adaptation strategies that will be tested using the integrated model reflecting stakeholder preferences. Model development will require the integration of components that typically are treated separately, including rainfall-runoff processes, groundwater flow and contaminant transport, and agricultural planting decisions, all of which impact the management of surface and groundwater storage. A participatory modeling process will engage stakeholders to inform the model assumptions, uncertainties, its development and analysis tools, resulting in a transparent way that integrates local knowledge with scientific data to produce effective policy action. Finally, the value of adaptive strategies will be assessed using a cooperative game-theory approach to understand the tradeoffs between stakeholders with conflicting preferences. While this project will focus on the Tulare Basin in California's Central Valley, a region which exemplifies the challenges of extensive agricultural production, limited water supply, and significant disadvantaged communities, the project will provide new insights and approaches for other regions of the United States facing similar difficult tradeoffs between economic and water security. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.