CIVIC-PG Track A: Smart Watersheds for Conservation and Resilience

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Flooding is the leading cause of natural disaster fatalities and property damage in the US. Simultaneously, communities along rivers are facing unprecedented ecological challenges, such as harmful algal blooms, polluted waters, and degraded fish habitats. This Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project will enable the smart watershed – a landscape covered by connected sensors, whose data are analyzed to coordinate the flow of water between communities. The smart watershed will help address challenges of water pollution, flooding, and extreme weather. This community-led project brings together watershed planners, policy planners, ecologists, ethnographers, engineers, and dam operators along the Huron River in Michigan. The research will span multiple disciplines, ecosystems, communities, and residents across 800 square miles. Once validated at this scale, the smart watershed will become a viable blueprint to address flooding, ecological conservation, and climate resilience for communities across the US.The guiding hypothesis of this project is that smart watersheds will reduce flooding and restore the natural flows of rivers by helping dam operators coordinate water releases between communities. The hypothesis will be tested by answering the following research questions: (1) which social mechanisms underpin the major barriers to the adoption of real-time coordination between distributed dam operators in a watershed, (2) how should real-time data be disseminated to maximize the usability of decision- support systems, and (3) how should dynamical control algorithms be structured, parametrized, and constrained to support a positive feedback loop that maximally incentivizes participation by a group of operators? This research will lead to advances in fundamental knowledge, spanning ecology, water science, social science, data science, and controls. The project will result web-based decision support systems, which will ingest sensor data to help operators coordinate the flow of water in real-time. In the long term, the project will culminate in a successful demonstration of real-time coordination, as measured by ecologic indicators, reduction in flooding and operator trust. Ecological indicators will be measured directly via sensors and laboratory samples, while operator perceptions, trust, and broader outcomes will be measured through ethnographic methods, interviews, and surveys. Finally, the collective team, in partnership with policy planners from the coalition of local governments, will promote the findings of the project as part of best practices that can be followed by others across country.This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program—Track A. Living in a changing climate: pre-disaster action around adaptation, resilience, and mitigation—and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.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.