NRT: Rivers, Watersheds, Communities: Training an Innovative, Cross-Sector Workforce for Equitable, Multi-Scale Decision-Making Towards Human and Ecosystem Health

Rivers provide food and clean water, transportation pathways, energy production, travel corridors for organisms, and cultural and spiritual values for people. Despite their importance, many river systems are highly contaminated with toxins, sediment, nutrients, and metals. Contamination originates from many sources, including industrial activity, pesticide runoff, wastewater treatment discharges, and urban runoff.

This contamination is considered an invisible water crisis posing serious risks for wildlife and human health in many places. As this crisis escalates in watersheds, it impacts the communities living in these watersheds adversely. Therefore, it becomes important to train a new workforce capable of integrating scientific information, public policy, and the knowledge and concerns of affected social groups, including Native American tribes, for effective management of the resources of river systems.

This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the Washington State University will train graduate students from across the United States how to study challenges in rivers, watersheds, and communities as they relate to human and ecosystem health and will use the Columbia River Basin as the study site. The project anticipates training 65 master’s and doctoral degree students, including 25 funded trainees, from civil and environmental engineering, biological sciences, environmental and natural resources sciences, environmental sociology, and political science.

Central to the traineeship is developing a community engagement approach that begins with the recognition that communities face diverse and complex issues and leverages knowledge of native communities to identify key problems and implement equitable solutions. Students participating in this program will engage with communities to co-produce solutions and opportunities to the invisible water crisis through scientific training, research, and problem-solving.

This NRT program will integrate the natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, and traditional knowledges to develop a transdisciplinary research program in river-watershed-community systems that ultimately will produce equitable solutions to pressing, societal problems experienced by diverse communities. Program activities are focused on two education and training objectives aimed to: (1) cause a cultural shift in STEM graduate education by embracing transdisciplinary learning and the co-production of knowledge through community engagement, and (2) transform our STEM graduate training into a student-centered mentoring model.

Education and research themes address basic and applied research questions related to water quality and landscape dynamics of river systems, anthropogenic changes in the environment that affect ecosystem health, and equitable mitigation of the cultural, economic, or health consequences experienced by communities. The traineeship program gives students the flexibility to pursue individualized research paths and provides hands-on training experiences to build skill and competency in communication, teamwork, ethics, cultural knowledge, traditional knowledges, transdisciplinarity, and quantitative/computational research methods.

Program elements weave engagement experiences throughout the student experience in the form of novel courses, leadership training, a Columbia River Basin Living Atlas focused on data integration and visualization, and multi-media communication. The student-centered mentoring model includes a trainee development plan, external mentoring, and faculty development.

Program elements will be institutionalized in the form of a Science and Community Engagement (ScienCE) certificate available to all STEM students.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

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.