A History of Data Practices in the Water Sciences

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This project is a historical study of data practices in hydrology, the science dealing with the properties, distribution, and circulation of water on and below the earth's surface. Many of these practices continue to be used by scientists today to study and manage erosion, flooding, water scarcity, and a wide range of other water-related problems. This project will shed light on the historical origins of practices of data collection, management, analysis, and sharing that continue to be used by earth and environmental scientists. The requested funds will support travel for archival research, and for undergraduate and graduate student research assistants. It will result in a scholarly book and journal articles, a new undergraduate course on environmental data, research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and insights into the history of data practices that may help to improve scientific pedagogy, data-sharing initiatives, and the use of scientific data in policy making.Hydrology and fluvial geomorphology became increasingly quantitative, mathematical, experimental, and data-intensive from the 1940s to the 1970s, a critical period in the history of the water sciences in the United States. To develop mathematical models of interactions between water and land, hydrologists and fluvial geomorphologists found it necessary to gather new kinds of data and to develop new ways of organizing, analyzing, and sharing them. In some cases, they re-purposed existing sources of data, while in other cases they launched entirely new data-gathering enterprises including novel kinds of field surveys and laboratory experiments. They also established new agreements and institutions to standardize data and encourage data sharing. These data practices proved critical to the management of water resources in the rapidly developing U.S. West as well as in other arid regions around the world. They also proved controversial; various stakeholders fought to determine which data were relevant, whether they could be trusted, and how they should be interpreted. This project will show how the sciences of water informed responses to emerging water problems and were in turn shaped by them. It will contribute to our understanding of the rise of quantitative, mathematical, and data-intensive techniques for understanding the Earth and managing the human environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.