The University of Idaho and Washington State University are awarded a Water, Sustainability and Climate Type 1 award to develop the organizing framework for a systematic assessment of urbanization and its impacts on water in the Spokane, Washington-Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Corridor. The framework is grounded in collaboration between scientists and the local communities in the area. The principal goal of the award will be to accomplish an improved understanding of linkages between human dimensions and water resources as a coupled human-natural system. This will be based on accessing and assessing existing data and models, and adding essential new social science data to refine, integrate, and optimize established models. Optimization models will develop scenarios that can be evaluated and adopted by policy and decision makers in the communities of the Spokane-Coeur d'Alene Corridor. A systems approach will be used in this project to address the complex intersection of water resources and human activity including climate dynamics, water quantity/quality, landscape dynamics, distributed and renewable energy, social/economic factors, cultural and demographic change, natural resource law, built environment/engineering infrastructure, transportation planning/policies, urban-wildland/agriculture interface, and new threats from changing environments (e.g., wildfire impacts, invasive species). The work that will be accomplished will be performed by researchers from the University of Idaho and Washington State University and the state, federal, city, county and tribal institutions that acquire data and are responsible for the management of their resources and communities.
The award will build an education and engagement program that involves partners and core stakeholders in the collaborative effort. Broader impacts will occur in three ways: (1) holding of public fora that advance discovery and understanding, (2) providing broad dissemination of planning efforts and products to stakeholders throughout the study area and in other communities in the region, and (3) transferring direct benefits to society through the exploration of policy options with decision-makers. The project will partner with education programs to provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and sustainability products for K-12 programming and teacher training. Partnerships with the tribes will focus on integrating underrepresented groups into the research and will engage indigenous and non-indigenous graduate students in development of stakeholder workshops and education programs. The program will build partnerships with the Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, and Colville Tribes and engage Native American graduate students in the processes. Owing to their rich culture and history these tribes are essential partners in the research and outreach of the research program.
This project was a collaborative effort including dedicated researchers, administrators and staff from both the University of Idaho and Washington State University. Our objectives through this project were to assess the complex interactions among ecological, engineering and social dynamics within the rapidly urbanizing Spokane – Coeur d’Alene Corridor of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. This involved (i) summarizing the available ecological and engineering data sets characterizing both the Spokane Valley – Rathdrum Prairie aquifer and its interaction with stream flows, especially in the Spokane River, and (ii) collecting new data to analyze human interactions with and impact on water resources. We began our effort through a series of meetings with individual stakeholders and potential partnering organizations from the entirety of the aquifer including non-profit, environmental, legal, Coeur d’Alene tribe, development resource management agencies and private entities at both the local and state levels. These efforts enabled positive outcomes and development of considerable collaborative potential as university and community experts learned about how to utilize one another's strengths to overcome the practical and scientific challenges facing water management in this highly variable area. An example of this positive outcome is the close working relationship with local partners. We worked closely with the Spokane River Forum, an educational forum including engineering and technical experts, non-profit organizers, developers, scientists and researchers, regulatory experts, and co-hosted an annual water forum conference. The events included a day-long set of expert presentations about legacy and current causes and challenges of PCBs in the Spokane Valley - Rathdrum Prairie aquifer. In addition to presentations the event also included an interactive session about stakeholder concerns and opinions. Clickers were used to allow participants to anonymously answer a variety of question they had of one another. These questions were developed through individual interviews and included topics such as whether or not to spend the time and money to do a PCB Total Maximum Daily Load or to go directly to implementation. This offered stakeholders the opportunity to "test the waters" about potential concerns without the implications of political backlash of public statements. Based on comments and the many obvious "ah-ha" moments the exercise did lend to building trust and a better understanding of community dynamics. Additional outcomes involve partnering with local agencies and organizations on jointly developed grant proposals. We have partnered with the Spokane County Water Resource Division and Spokane River Forum to better understand the complex interactions among natural and social dynamics which drive water demand. Specifically, outdoor water consumption is highly variable in ways which are not explained by variability of natural conditions or simple economic capacity. Broader outcomes include trust in the team of researchers that has led to willingness to participate in collaborative modeling processes being initiated in the recently funded NSF/USDA WSC Cat3 Watershed Integrated System Dynamics Modeling (WISDM). Additional interactive exercises are being planned with the River Forum for each of the following three years as a part of the iterative model building process within WISDM. Other outreach activities that have resulted from this event are in the planning stage and will continue to increase the presence of WSU and UI in the SCC. Relationships built in the SCC PCP process will also facilitate WISDM though feed back to ongoing, collaborative work to improve local watershed planning: building bridges across watershed boundaries. We are developing a Sustainability Assessment (SA) as a methodology for creating a watershed-wide process to enhance collaboration and coordination between processes. Local watershed planning has come as a result of recognizing that solutions to local problems needed to be discovered and implemented by those who are affected by both the problems and the solutions. In large basins with multiple sub watersheds this approach can lead to upstream-downstream tension if the planning processes are not coordinated. The timing of planning processes, available funding, different land use (agriculture vs. urban development) and a variety of potentially conflicting values hampers coordination. In addition local laws and ordinances may differ and the sub watersheds may be in different states. Regional SA can be utilized to serve as a bridge between and across local watershed planning efforts so as to build a suite of shared goals and collaboration across watershed plans. Stakeholder feedback will help inform the specific SCC attributes that will customize this analysis to the SCC. The outcome of this research will inform collaborative model building in multiple emerging and ongoing projects to improve integrated water management.
