Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for One Water

工程研究中心规划拨款竞赛是ERC项目的试点征集。规划补助金不需要作为ERC竞赛的一部分，但它旨在在团队之间建立能力，以规划聚合的、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，这是由于干旱、不断增长和竞争的需求以及盐度的增加。美国和墨西哥交界的许多州，尤其是科罗拉多河和格兰德河流域，未来将面临一场水危机，包括日益频繁和严重的干旱时期，以及城市、农业和环境部门对水的需求不断增长。孤立?在美国，过去100年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，已无法在未来维持我们的城市和农场。我们需要一个？一个水吗?全面、全面、综合的管理方法，以迎接21世纪的挑战。我们在此提出了一个新颖、创新和融合的规划过程，以培养一个由工程师、科学家和利益相关者组成的团队，他们对水部门、问题和解决方案有统一的认识，并对一个水工程研究中心有共同的愿景，这将产生具有广泛社会影响的新技术发现。我们将在培训未来的水资源专业人员的同时，应对缺水地区的用水挑战。我们的目标是根据最近nsf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，制定和实施一个规划过程。这个过程将为如何在早期形成阶段有效地领导融合研究团队提供一个模型。通过一系列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形成一种新型ERC的共同愿景。通过深度整合不同观点所产生的协同效应，催化变革性创新。该产品将是关于在景观尺度上管理水的一种水方法的建议，这种方法将所有用水部门的需求与社会和环境需求结合起来。这一规划赠款的汇合产物将是一个具有动态系统理解的综合团队，这将作为未来水管理的路线图。我们对“同一水中心”的愿景是，它将为制定这一路线图提供强有力的基础，包括水研究、工程、管理、教育和推广，这一路线图以创新和尖端科学技术为基础，解决未来几十年满足所有主要用水部门用水需求的看似棘手的问题。我们将在美墨边境的北帕索（Paso del Norte）地区进行这种“一水”方法的试验，这是一个特别具有挑战性的干旱地区，受到水资源短缺、气候、对水的竞争性需求、高贫困率以及复杂的水治理系统（包括国际边界和多个州和地方司法管辖区）的威胁。研究结果将广泛适用于世界上其他干旱和半干旱地区，在这些地区，缺水是当地甚至全球冲突的根源。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.