0747276 (Cai). This CAREER award focuses on sustainable watershed management (SWM) using quantitative interdisciplinary analysis to understand the inter-relationships and ecological thresholds within complex watershed systems characterized by hydrological-ecological-socioeconomic relationships. Explicit ecological target equations (ETEs) that quantify the relationships between fish community diversity and abundance and ecologically relevant environmental indicators (EREIs, e.g., streamflow and water quality metrics) will be developed. A multiple agent system (MAS) model combining heterogeneous agent behaviors, watershed hydrology, and quantitative environmental-ecological relationships will be implemented. Scientifically meaningful ecological thresholds will be identified and validated. A problem oriented, demand-driven mutual learning approach to research and education, which facilitates critical thinking and assimilates reflective experiences and lessons into quantitative analysis, will be created.

Intellectual Merit. The ETE concept and tool will explicitly address the relevance of environmental variables to the target ecosystem. Identifying the EREIs from hundreds of metrics will resolve the indicator redundancy problem that hinders both the scientific understanding of ecology-hydrology connectedness and engineering design for watershed restoration. Fundamental questions, such as how human interference forces watershed ecosystems across thresholds, will be addressed through MAS-based modeling. The discovery and understanding of ecological thresholds is the key to early warning of irreversible transitions in watersheds.

Broader Impacts. This project paves the way for five broad impacts: 1) ETEs and EREIs will be effective tools for both ecologists and hydrologists, and the findings on ecology-hydrology connectedness are expected to stimulate wider and deeper scientific research, 2) the MAS-based virtual model will provide a communication among the education, research, and practice sectors of SWM for a wide range of problems related to scientific understanding, management policy evaluation, and decision making support, 3) the concepts, procedures, and tools to be developed will be generalizable enough to be extendible to non-fish ecosystem indicators such as riparian vegetation and habitats, 4) virtual tool exercises will provide guidelines for more efficient sensing and monitoring system design and for cyberinfrastructure development in watersheds,, and 5) the mutual learning program will enhance long-term sustainability by intentionally connecting stakeholder groups, providing new opportunities to increase involvement and participation of minority and underrepresented stakeholders.

Project Report

On the collective journey of transition toward sustainability, the world faces great uncertainty due to the ill-defined nature of sustainability problems, specific to this project, the lack of knowledge on the connectedness and interactions among anthropogenic, physical, and biological processes in the context of watersheds. To fill the knowledge gap, this project was motivated to address fundamental research questions including: To what degree can a watershed or its components bear the harm caused by the stresses? What factors determine the limits of resilience and sources of vulnerability for such interactive systems? How do local choices impact the whole system – how do local individual actions (e.g., land and water uses) lead to system output (e.g., water quality, flow regime change)? What is the role of stakeholders’ participation in seeking solutions to deal with watershed management problems and how to enhance the participation? These questions have been addressed by the CAREER project through the accomplishment of the proposed activities, including a) quantifying the hydrological-ecological connectedness and applying the relations to update the operation of water systems; b) exploring the human footprint in hydrological processes; c) identifying non-stationary features in climatic and hydrologic time series; d) developing web-based modeling tools to facilitate watershed management participation; e) applying the newly developed modeling tools to real-world watershed management problems. Selected findings include: 1) It is the timing of low flow rather than the magnitude of low flow that affects fish diversity (e.g., the Fox River in northern Illinois) 2) Adding an ecological objective can improve downstream fish habitat without jeopardizing its original water use objective through revised reservoir operation (e.g., exploring a win-win solution for the operation of the Lake Shelbyville in Illinois, see attached Figure 1) 3) Human interferences change some empirical relationships widely used in hydrology, for example, they make some conventionally recognized nonlinear relationships into linear (e.g., with inter-annual ET variability, see attached Figure 2) and some linear relationship into nonlinear (e.g., low flow recession curve, see attached Figure 3). 4) Human interference is found to be the controlling factor of low flow and inter-annual variability of evapotranspiration (ET, see Figure 2) 5) Co-evolution of natural environment change and human adaptation under climate change is identified in an urban watershed, showing an evidence of sustainable watershed development (Figure 5). 6) A realistic reservoir operation optimization model can be built by catching the missing constraints which affect decision making in reservoir operation. 7) Watersheds can be modeled as coupled natural-human systems with inter-connected distributed decisions (behaviors) and hydrologic processes; cutting-edge computational technologies such as Cloud and parallel computing can make the complex watershed models accessible online by the public (Figure 6). An online virtual watershed tool has been developed for education and extension purposes. This project has partially sponsored one postdoc, four PhD theses (two of the PhD students are now university faculty members) and three MS theses; it resulted in 23 journal papers and 35 conference papers.

Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2008-01-15
Budget End
2013-12-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2007
Total Cost
$400,000
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Champaign
State
IL
Country
United States
Zip Code
61820