In this Award from the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows Program) Dr. Nita Bijoor from the University of Califonia - Irvine will study the ways in which socioeconomic, biophysical, and management factors can be used to develop an integrated Irrigation Sustainability Framework. This award has support from: the Directorate for Engineering, the Directorate for Geosciences and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
The proposed work will combine: location-tagged water-use data obtained from seven governmental organizations in Southern California, land use/ land cover data from the Municipal Water District of Orange County (based upon aerial survey data), and other geological and socioeconomic databases to quantify irrigation efficiency and develop improved models to manage water use.
The aim of studies like that proposed in this work is to develop better models for water use, with the aim towards providing useful data to help policy makers make informed decisions on sustainable ways to manage water in an arid urban environment.
Dr. Bijoor will be working with closely with collaborators Prof. James S. Famiglietti, Director of the Center for Hydrological Modeling at the University of California-Irvine, and Mr. Joseph Berg of the Municipal Water District of Orange County. Dr. Bijoor will also work with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, Orange County Coastkeeper, and the Valley Crest Design Group.
This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.
