NCEAS Working Groups
Human impacts of water infrastructure on watershed ecosystems and the sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the coterminous US
Project Description
There are over 75,000 large dams on rivers in the United States alone. The goal of this project is to measure the ecological footprint of these dams in watersheds across the lower 48 states in the U.S. We will define this footprint in terms of the effect dams have had on:
water quantity and quality
the number of native and non-native species in rivers
the salinity of soils in productive agricultural areas
the demand for irrigated water by the 100 largest cities in the U.S.
Additionally, we will use information from global climate change models and other models that describe how water moves across landscapes to develop sustainable solutions to water shortages that consider water for cities, farms and biodiversity conservation. The research will prepare us for a final workshop in which noted popular press authors and policy makers are invited to write an opinion piece for The New York Times. This article will comment on the state of U.S. freshwater infrastructure (based on our scientific work), and propose a policy platform for freshwater sustainability in the U.S.
Principal Investigator(s)
John L. Sabo, Laura C. Bowling, Gerrit H. Schoups
Project Dates
Start: October 5, 2009
End: April 11, 2013
completed
Participants
- Sankur Arumugam
- North Carolina State University
- Laura C. Bowling
- Purdue University
- Noah Diffenbaugh
- Stanford University
- Caitlin Dyckman
- Clemson University
- William L. Graf
- University of South Carolina
- Michael Hanemann
- Arizona State University
- John S. Kominoski
- University of Georgia
- Kenneth E. Kunkel
- Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
- Robert Lang
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- Brian Richter
- The Nature Conservancy
- Jennifer Roath
- Purdue University
- John L. Sabo
- Arizona State University
- Gerrit H. Schoups
- Delft University of Technology
- Tushar Sinha
- North Carolina State University
- Stuart Sweeney
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Laura O. Taylor
- North Carolina State University
- Wesley W. Wallender
- University of California, Davis
Products
-
Journal Article / 2010
Sedimentation and sustainability of western American reservoirs
-
Journal Article / 2010
Climate Change and Water in Southwestern North America Special Feature: Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert