NSF Award
2418752
Climate change is affecting communities across the United States. It is causing water shortages for drinking and farming, and it also makes it hard to keep water clean and protect aquatic life. These issues impact everyone, regardless of financial status. They are particularly harsh on communities without proper infrastructure to prepare for, adapt to, and recover from water management problems, leading to economic losses and the loss of historic homelands. Extreme conditions can also cause harmful substances to spread beyond already contaminated areas. This project focuses on the Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, the Navajo Tribe in New Mexico, and flood-prone farming communities in Vermont. These groups are experiencing more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, and floods. To address these challenges, we need to create intelligent and affordable systems to monitor water quantity and quality, using Indigenous knowledge and easy-to-use sensors to detect and measure pollutants in real-time. This collaboration, called Advancing Quality and Climate-Resilient Water Management with Community Partnerships and Enhanced Sensor Network (AQUA-CLIME), aims to help the Lakota Tribe, the Navajo Tribe, and Vermont farmers manage water quality and quantity issues caused by climate change. AQUA-CLIME will engage research experts, practicing professionals, and Indigenous communities from the University of Vermont and Norwich University in Vermont, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota, and New Mexico State University and Navajo Technical University in New Mexico. AQUA-CLIME will create a climate change research network involving people, equipment, and technology. It will enable smooth cooperation among Native American communities, farmers, students, teachers, industry groups, state agencies, and nonprofits. The project will also support career development for about 350 people, including 25 faculty researchers, 12 graduate students, 25 undergraduates, and 300 middle and high school students.<br/><br/>The technical outcomes from this project would reveal underlying knowledge gaps about climate change impacts on water quality and quantity facing Indigenous tribes and agricultural communities in the three participating jurisdictions and broadly applicable to the U.S. The convergence research infrastructure guided by Indigenous knowledge is expected to yield fundamental insights to address data knowledge gaps and generate timely, actionable information for contaminants identification, quantification, mitigation, and communication. Outcomes from the work would include: (i) an integrated data science framework for monitoring contaminants under diverse climate change scenarios; (ii) a spatially distributed network of affordable, printable sensors and surrogate sensors for monitoring contaminants in watershed; (iii) data fusion methods for analyzing complex interactions among climate change scenarios and contaminant source/sink dynamics; (iv) strategies for integrating sensor networks for effective and equitable management of water resources; (v) functionalization strategies for obtaining smaller and yet smarter microsensors. The project will build community-academic partnerships that will contribute to a climate-resilient water management solutions for securing water quality and quantity, develop a future-ready expert workforce, and positively impact the socioeconomic status of disadvantaged communities in the three jurisdictions. This project is funded by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement-Focused EPSCoR Collaborations (RII-FEC) program. The RII-FEC program builds inter-jurisdictional collaborative teams of EPSCoR investigators in focus areas consistent with the NSF Strategic Plan. RII-FEC projects include researchers from at least two EPSCoR eligible jurisdictions with complementary expertise and resources necessary to address challenges, which neither party could address as well or as rapidly independently.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
