Research

In this project, we will engage with water providers, tribal representatives, agricultural and other water users, ecological interests, and recreational groups about future snowpack and streamflow conditions, increasing understanding of how they view water system resilience to compound hazards. This continued engagement is essential both to disseminate new research findings and to understand evolving information and planning landscapes.

Water system managers in the Intermountain West face enormous challenges navigating unpredictable streamflow forecasts, changing snowpack behavior, and the increasingly dangerous threat of wildfire to both water quality and quantity. In this project, we aim to engage directly with water system managers in an iterative project to (1) increase understanding of their perceptions of water system resilience, (2) identify key components of regional water system resilience across a range of scales from small rural systems to larger urban systems, and (3) convene cross-scale water manager conversations to support peer learning and identify opportunities to collaboratively build equitable and just regional water system resilience. This project stems directly from conversations with the US Forest Service, Northern Water, and Denver Water.

When communities experience the impacts of compound hazards, responses are often reactive and it is often too late to respond in an efficient and effective manner (Raymond et al. 2020). Just as academic disciplines are often siloed, sectors and decision-makers can be siloed from one another and not understand interconnections or linkages in decision-making. Social network analysis has been used to understand how information and resources flow through a system and how they influence adaptation actions (Jones & Faas 2016). While social networks have been looked at retrospectively, they have rarely been assessed in a co-produced approach with stakeholders to proactively assess and shift networks to build system resilience (Maldonado 2017).

This project supports water system resilience through use-inspired research that helps providers prepare for vulnerabilities due to seasonal water supply prediction errors. We will make meaningful advances in the understanding of existing water supply forecast vulnerabilities and identifying realistic potential adaptations for water systems.

Wildfire is a critical vulnerability for water systems in the Intermountain West, particularly those with intakes located in or downstream of forested areas. This project seeks to increase our understanding of the status of water system resilience in the context of changing wildfire risk. It will make key advances by explicitly quantifying the role of fine-scale, spatially distributed snowpack in wildfire risk/resilience under a range of historical precipitation/temperature conditions, as a way to anticipate future wildfire risks under climate change scenarios. The critical advances in scale will support the use of finer land surface/ecological classifications in wildfire risk assessments of future climate projections.