INFEWS/T2: Flexible Model Compositions and Visual Representations for Planning and Policy Decisions at the Sub-regional level of the food-energy-water nexus

近年来，人们越来越关注粮食、能源和水系统之间的过程和相互作用，或所谓的粮食-能源-水(少数)关系，以及由此对可持续性、复原力和安全的影响。粮食代表农业贸易和消费，是区域经济的重要组成部分。农业、市政和工业用水的供应和处理以及农业活动的机械化都需要能源。水用于人类和工业消费、作物灌溉和能源生产。虽然粮食、能源和水之间的多方面相互作用通常被认为是一个系统对另一个系统的威胁或压力，但对反馈动态的基本了解对于确定协同效应和潜在效率是必要的。然而，尽管已知在少数几个联系中存在相互关系，但粮食、能源和水的政策、规划和管理决策通常是在彼此孤立的情况下做出的，没有充分考虑部门之间的权衡。这主要是因为每个孤立的系统都很复杂，这使得了解系统之间的相互联系很难确定，更不用说以综合方式进行评估了。尽管存在这一挑战，但迫切需要了解少数几个部门之间的联系、协同作用和冲突，以便为每个部门的政策提供基于证据的决策，这些政策最有可能对其他部门产生积极影响。为了实现这种整合，决策者需要将有关粮食-能量-水相互作用的国家、区域和地方规模影响的信息纳入到针对一系列未来条件制定强有力的政策决策中。通过这种方式，可以制定政策，以确保少数几个结点在变化的气候条件和未来下的弹性，以帮助确保公众福祉和可持续增长。本研究的总体目标是发展对食品、能源和水系统动力学的基本跨学科科学理解，为综合几个系统提供集成的建模、可视化和决策支持基础设施。这将需要开发(1)多分辨率综合建模框架，明确捕捉粮食、能源和水部门之间的反馈；(2)可视化基础设施，支持模型合成，揭示三个少数领域的级联效应及其多变量时空不确定性。这样的基础设施需要易于使用，并与分析和可视化工具无缝集成，适应新的算法，并应使个人能够获得关于其数据和相关不确定性的知识。为了测试建议的框架，本项目的重点将放在亚利桑那州的一个用例上，即菲尼克斯主动管理区(AMA)。菲尼克斯AMA是在次区域范围内探索少数关联关系的一个引人注目的案例研究，是设计和测试集成的建模、可视化和决策支持框架的理想选择，以交互方式探索少数系统之间的相互联系，并支持有效的资源管理和人力决策。虽然重点放在一个具体的研究区域，但这项提议的长期成果是建立一个灵活的、多尺度的可视化和决策支持基础设施，可以很容易地适应其他地点。研究计划的更广泛影响包括：1)以预测性建模框架的形式为政策、研究和教育提供基础设施；2)在与少数几个联系的多方向联系的背景下，扩大对可持续性不确定性下的决策的研究；3)加强计算机科学、水文学、农业、经济学和可持续性之间的伙伴关系，以鼓励发展能够实现模型耦合、预测性分析和利益攸关方参与的基础设施。其他信息可在项目网站(http://vader.lab.asu.edu/VA-INFEWS))上找到，包括开放源码软件、课程学习模块和其他材料。

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the processes and interactions among food, energy, and water systems, or the so-called food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, and the resulting implications for sustainability, resilience, and security. Food represents agricultural trade and consumption and is a critical component of a region's economy. Energy is required to supply and treat water for agriculture, municipal, and industrial uses, as well as to mechanize agricultural activities. Water is used for human and industrial consumption, crop irrigation, and energy production. While the multifaceted interactions between food, energy and water are often framed as threats or stresses of one system upon the others, basic understanding of the feedback dynamics is necessary for identifying synergies and potential efficiencies. Yet, despite known interrelationships at the FEW nexus, policy, planning, and management decisions for food, energy, and water are typically made in isolation from one another without full consideration of the tradeoffs between sectors. This is primarily because of the complexity of each isolated system, which makes understanding the interconnections between systems difficult to identify let alone assess in an integrated manner. Despite this challenge, knowledge of the linkages, synergies, and conflicts in the FEW nexus is desperately needed to provide evidence-based decision-making for policies in each sector that are most likely to produce positive effects in the other sectors. To achieve such integration, decision makers need to incorporate information about national, regional, and local scale impacts of food-energy-water interactions into the development of robust policy decisions across a range of future conditions. In this way, policies can be developed that can insure resilience of the FEW nexus under variable climate conditions and futures to help ensure public well-being and sustainable growth.The overarching goal of this research is to develop basic interdisciplinary scientific understanding of food, energy, and water system dynamics to inform an integrated modeling, visualization, and decision support infrastructure for comprehensive FEW systems. This will require the development of (i) a multi-resolution integrated modeling framework that explicitly captures the feedbacks among food, energy and water sectors; and (ii) a visualization infrastructure that enables model composition and reveals cascading effects across the three FEW areas as well as their multivariate spatiotemporal uncertainties. Such an infrastructure needs to be easy to use with a seamless integration of analytical and visual tools, adaptable to new algorithms, and should empower individuals to gain knowledge about their data and the associated uncertainty. To test the proposed framework, the focus of this project will be on a use case in Arizona, the Phoenix Active Management Area (AMA). The Phoenix AMA is a compelling case study for exploring the FEW nexus at sub-regional scale and is ideal to design and test an integrated modeling, visualization, and decision support framework to interactively explore the interconnections of the FEW systems and support effective resource management and human decision making. While the focus is on a specific study region, the long-term outcome of this proposal is to create a flexible and multiscale visualization and decision support infrastructure that could be easily adapted to other locations. Broader impacts of the research program include: 1) infrastructure for policy, research and education in the form of an anticipatory modeling framework; 2) expanding research in decision making under uncertainty for sustainability within the context of multi-directional linkages to FEW nexus, and; 3) enhanced partnerships between computer science, hydrology, agriculture, economics and sustainability to encourage the development of infrastructure that enables model coupling, anticipatory analysis and stakeholder engagement. Additional information can be found at the project website (http://vader.lab.asu.edu/VA-INFEWS) including open source software, course learning modules and other material.