NSF Convergence Accelerator Future Water Systems: TealWaters - Mapping and modeling the nation's wetlands and their benefits to enhance water access and community resilience

TealWaters maps current and past wetlands and illustrates their value. Communities across the United States and around the world face an urgent need for tools to effectively manage water on the landscape. Recognized as the "kidneys of the planet," wetlands capture and slow floodwaters, store surface water, and recharge groundwater – all while filtering pollution, supporting biodiversity, storing carbon, and more.

Yet over 50% of wetlands in the United States and worldwide have been lost, along with the knowledge of where wetlands were. TealWaters' groundbreaking platform builds on decades of advances across twelve scientific disciplines (e.g. remote sensing, geomorphology, hydrology, wetland ecology, AI/machine learning) to identify where wetlands are, the diverse benefits they provide, and where they have potential to be restored to regain those functions.

TealWaters' interactive web-map platform, open source analytical tools, and custom products allow natural resource professionals, policymakers, scientists, and citizens to ask and answer questions and explore scenarios (e.g. which restoration opportunities would best mitigate flooding or enhance water quality) to make informed decisions. TealWaters' ultimate goal is to increase communities’ resilience by providing urgently needed, accessible, scientifically advanced tools.

The foundation of the project's platform is the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) spatial data layer which gives the continuous probability of wetland extent across a landscape. WIP is based on a predictive model that combines physical, hydrologic, and ecological landscape information at multiple scales with on-the-ground knowledge and data. A major breakthrough is its ability to incorporate hidden geomorphic and hydrologic features, allowing users to "see" many smaller wetlands that are missed on other maps and identify the potential for wetland restoration based on where they might have existed in the past.

On this foundation, TealWaters' software layers scientific workflows for mapping and modeling specific wetland functions and develops these workflows into products implemented in the cloud. Wetland features may be combined with other user-specified datasets to identify sites for wetlands protection, creation, and restoration based on user priorities.

For wetland managers, planners, policymakers, and communities, TealWaters' platform radically expands the sophistication of, and access to, advanced tools for making decisions about how to manage water on the landscape. The products will also open new avenues of scientific idea generation, mechanistic prediction and hypothesis testing, integrative modeling, and vision-inspired new research.

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.