School of Natural Resources and the Environment

This project examines community perceptions and decisions about climate science, economics, and policies associated with resilience strategies that address increasing water scarcity in the Southwest. Strategies to be evaluated include: investments in built infrastructure (e.g., reservoirs and pipelines); incentive-based risk-sharing agreements; and watershed ecosystem services. The project emphasizes how ecosystem services can buffer water impacts of climate change, as well as the potential for climate mitigation as a strategy to enhance water supply security. Project outputs will include a replicable method for co-producing resilient water-related climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, including scientific and economic evaluation. Potential outcomes include improved water supply reliability and cooperation on adapting to shortages for a regional economy that exceeds $3 trillion annually.

The Transdisciplinary Environmental Science for Society (TESS) program trains researchers, practitioners, and educators to be well-equipped to address complex environmental challenges. The focus is on theoretical insights and practical skills to improve research collaborations between many kinds of experts. The program is currently designed as a series of three 20-hour online professional development courses: 1) fundamentals of transdisciplinary research, 2) practicing collaborative research, and 3) communication strategies and skills. Other related courses are under development including a graduate seminar and possibly an undergraduate course, both of which will focus on the challenges of global change and practical approaches to collaborative research that engages research and stakeholder communities.

Traditional graduate training—even programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity—tends to overvalue disciplinary knowledge and undervalue other ways of knowing (e.g., from different disciplines, but also from non-academic epistemologies) and integrative ways of viewing a complex problem. Typical graduate programs also commonly neglect the critical need for grounding students in the ideas and concepts that illuminate both barriers and opportunities for interactions and partnerships between science and practice and how to truly become boundary-spanning individuals. The goal of the TESS program is to provide training in the theory and practice of transdisciplinary research so that students have the knowledge and perspectives needed carry out successful collaborative research.

More information about the online professional development program can be found here: https://science4society.sites.arizona.edu/

Drought is a complex phenomenon that can vary widely over space to due to precipitation patterns and in time due to lagging impacts in slowly varying systems. These factors are magnified in the semiarid Southwest U.S., where extreme interannual climate variability, topography, and highly localized precipitation patterns (e.g., monsoon season thunderstorms) create highly varying hydroclimatic patterns in both space and time and subsequent drought impacts. Current climate monitoring networks across Arizona and New Mexico struggle to capture this variability and accurately portray potential drought conditions.

Complementary datasets, like remote sensing greenness, used in conjunction with existing climate data, offer the potential to monitor drought conditions across large landscapes with sparse monitoring networks. Several efforts, including online geovisualization tools to access raw normalized-difference vegetation index (NDVI or greenness) data and more formalized remote sensing-based drought monitoring tools like VegDRI, have been developed over the past decade. A new effort supported by a recent NOAA-SARP/NIDIS grant spurred the development of tool called DroughtView, which takes a slightly different approach in combining cutting-edge online geovisualization tools with derived remote sensing products targeted at detecting drought conditions. DroughtView builds on the success of its precursor, RangeView, which was developed with guidance from agriculturists and resource managers who need environmental monitoring data. The tools in DroughtView are used to monitor biweekly changes in land surface greenness conditions as a proxy for drought impacts at very fine spatial scales across the Southwest U.S. More information can be found at http://droughtview.arizona.edu

DroughtView combines geovisualization tools with remote sensing products to detect drought conditions. The DroughtView tool served as a key piece of information to help the National Resources Conservation Service, US Bureau of Land Management, and US Forest Service range managers determine drought conditions and Farm Services Agency drought disaster assistance eligibility. DroughtView is a web-based decision-support tool for computers and mobile devices that combines satellite-derived measures of surface greenness with additional geospatial data so that users can visualize and evaluate vegetation dynamics across space and over time.

Sky Island Alliance is working with partners including the NOAA-funded Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS), the Udall Foundation U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, EcoAdapt, the University of Arizona Institute of the Environment, and School of Natural Resources and the Environment to connect leading planners and thinkers in natural resource management and conservation with experts on regional climate impacts and adaptation. Through this project researchers seek to increase resilience in the region by ensuring implementation of climate-smart, landscape level management and conservation. Tools include a climate change adaptation survey, the Arizona Climate Change Network (Sky Island Alliance), and climate change adaptation workshops.