Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for One Water

工程研究中心规划奖助金竞赛是作为ERC计划的试点征集活动进行的。计划拨款并不是整个ERC竞赛的一部分，而是为了在团队之间建立能力，以计划集中的、中心规模的工程研究。美国西南部和世界的干旱和半干旱地区受到可用水供应减少的威胁，原因是干旱、不断增长和竞争的需求以及日益加剧的盐碱度。美国/墨西哥的许多边境州，尤其是科罗拉多州和里奥格兰德河流域，未来将面临一场水危机，其中包括日益频繁和严重的干旱，以及城市、农业和环境部门对水的需求不断增长。过去100年的“孤立”、零敲碎打的水资源管理方法，在满足环境和社会关切的同时，也无法维持我们未来的城市和农场。我们需要一杯？一杯水？管理方法，一种全面、全面和综合的管理方法，以应对21世纪的挑战。我们在这里提出了一种新颖、创新和融合的规划流程，以培养一支由工程师、科学家和利益相关者组成的团队，他们对水行业、问题和解决方案有着统一的理解，并为One Water Engineering Research Center制定了共同的愿景，将产生具有广泛社会影响的新技术发现。我们将在培训未来水资源专业人员的同时，应对我们缺水地区的水资源挑战。我们的目标是制定和实施一个规划过程，该过程受到美国国家科学基金会最近资助的关于团队科学和跨学科和视角的融合学习的基础研究的启发。这一过程将为如何有效地领导汇聚的研究团队在其早期形成阶段提供一个模式。通过一系列战略性的利益相关者焦点小组会议、研究人员峰会和研究人员工作会议，我们将在研究人员和利益相关者之间产生一种新型ERC的共同愿景？一种通过深度整合不同视角所产生的协同效应来催化变革性创新。该产品将是一项关于在景观范围内管理水的统一用水办法的提案，该办法将所有用水部门的需求与社会和环境需求相结合。这一规划赠款的融合产品将是一个具有动态系统理解的综合团队，将作为未来水管理的路线图。我们对One Water Center的愿景是，它将为制定这一路线图提供水研究、工程、管理、教育和推广所需的强大基础，这一路线图以创新和尖端科学技术为基础，以解决在未来几十年满足所有主要用水部门的水需求这一看似棘手的问题。我们将在美国和墨西哥交界处的北帕索德尔州进行这一项目的试验，这是一个特别严峻的干旱地区，受到水资源短缺、气候、相互竞争的用水需求、高贫困率以及包括国际边界和多个州和地方司法管辖区在内的复杂水治理体系的威胁。这一结果将广泛适用于世界上其他干旱和半干旱地区，那里的缺水是局部甚至全球冲突的根源。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.Arid and semi-arid regions of the southwestern U.S. and the world are threatened by dwindling usable water supplies, driven by drought, growing and competing demands, and increasing salinity. Many of the U.S./Mexico border States, and especially the Colorado and Rio Grande river basins, face a future water crisis that includes increasingly frequent and severe periods of drought and growing demands for water in the urban, agricultural, and environmental sectors. The ?siloed?, piecemeal water management approach of the past 100 years is unable to sustain our cities and farms in the future, while meeting environmental and social concerns, as well. We need a ?One Water? management approach, one that is holistic, comprehensive and integrated to meet the challenges of the 21st century. We propose here a novel, innovative, and convergent planning process to develop a team of engineers, scientists, and stakeholders with a unified understanding of water sectors, problems, and solutions and a shared vision for the One Water Engineering Research Center that will generate new technical discoveries with broad societal impact. We will meet the water challenges of our water scarce region while training the water resource professionals of the future. Our goal is to formulate and implement a planning process that is informed by recent NSF-funded basic research on team science and convergent learning across disciplines and perspectives. This process will provide a model for how to effectively lead convergent research teams during their early, formative stage. With a strategic series of stakeholder focus group meetings, researcher summit meetings, and researcher working meetings, we will generate a shared vision among researchers and stakeholders of a new kind of ERC ? one that catalyzes transformative innovations through the synergies created by deeply integrating diverse perspectives. The product will be a proposal for a One Water approach to the management of water on a landscape scale, one that integrates the needs of all sectors of water users with social and environmental needs. The convergent product of this planning grant will be an integrated team with a dynamic system understanding that will serve as the roadmap for future water management. Our vision for the One Water Center is that it will provide the strong underpinning of water research, engineering, management, education, and outreach needed to develop this roadmap, one that is based on innovation and cutting-edge science and technology, to solve the seemingly intractable problems of meeting the water needs of all major use sectors in the coming decades. Our testbed for this One Water Approach will be the Paso del Norte region of the U.S./Mexico border, a particularly challenged arid region threatened by water scarcity, climate, competing demands for water, high rates of poverty, and a complex water governance system including an international border and multiple state and local jurisdictions. The results will be widely applicable to other arid and semi-arid regions of the world where water scarcity is a source of local and even global conflict.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.