RII Track-1: Anticipating the Climate-Water Transition and Cascading Challenges to Socio-Environmental Systems in America's Headwaters

The Anticipating the Climate-Water Transition and Cascading Challenges to Socio-Environmental Systems in America's Headwaters (WY-ACT) project will bring together researchers from across Wyoming to address critical water resource challenges arising from climate change in Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region. Researchers will identify challenges, quantify risks, and predict societal consequences of shifting climate conditions in the nation’s critical headwater areas, limited by uncertainties in how hydrological, ecological, and sociological systems interact.

Wyoming provides the prefect system to study these climate uncertainties due to its mountainous ecosystems that link high-elevation National Parks and other federal lands to a mosaic of lower-elevation tribal, state, federal, and private lands and waters. The project is designed to create solutions to strains on water availability resulting from climate change by building trusted networks with communities who will have opportunities to provide input as well as help the project team formulate outcomes.

The project will provide significant opportunities to engage Wyoming communities in STEM education and develop significant computational resources for the state. WY-ACT will be administered by the University of Wyoming in collaboration with Central Wyoming College and Western Ecosystem Technology, a private company.

The Anticipating the Climate-Water Transition and Cascading Challenges to Socio-Environmental Systems in America's Headwaters (WY-ACT) project will create a world-class research and STEM training facility that will address critical water resource challenges arising from climate change in Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region. WY-ACT’s goals are to: 1) identify climate-driven risks to interacting hydrological, ecological and social systems; 2) reveal opportunities and limits for how communities and stakeholders respond to climate-induced risks; 3) evaluate how the process of co-production enhances adaptive capacity for key stakeholders by building trust in numerical models; and 4) integrate the understanding and quantification of risks and uncertainties across climate, hydrological, ecological, and social systems that are informed by models, observations, and stakeholder collaboration.

These project goals will be achieved by a transdisciplinary approach that includes social science, climate science, economics, hydrology, data science, ecology, and communication. Additionally, this project recognizes the value of involving Tribal Nations in co-production, and will include indigenous knowledge, practitioner knowledge, experiential knowledge, and scientific ways of understanding to inform and enhance the understanding of changing water availability and its implications.

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.