| NSF Org: |
OIA OIA-Office of Integrative Activities |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 23, 2013 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | January 17, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 1329470 |
| Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
| Program Manager: |
Raffaella Montelli
OIA OIA-Office of Integrative Activities O/D Office Of The Director |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2013 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,000,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,000,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1700 LOMAS BLVD NE STE 2200 ALBUQUERQUE NM US 87131 (505)277-4186 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
NM US 87131-0001 |
| Primary Place of Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EPSCoR Research Infrastructure |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.079, 47.083 |
ABSTRACT
Mechanisms responsible for observed and projected hydrologic change in high-elevation catchments are poorly understood, especially with respect to snowpack dynamics, surface-water/groundwater linkages, and interactions with vegetation. Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico envision a Western Consortium for Watershed Analysis, Visualization, and Exploration (WC-WAVE) whose overarching goal is to advance watershed science, workforce development, and education with cyberinfrastructure (CI)-enabled discovery and innovation. WC-WAVE has three integrated components, with associated goals and approaches:
1. Watershed Science: Advance understanding of hydrologic interactions and their impact on ecosystem services using a virtual watershed (VW) framework. Watershed scientists and students parameterize, run, validate, and integrate watershed models; specify VW user requirements; and provide feedback on the evolving CI platform.
2. Visualization and Data CI: Accelerate collaborative, interdisciplinary watershed research and discovery through innovative visualization environments and through streamlined data management, discovery, and access. The CI team develops, tests, deploys and integrates the VW data and service platform components. CI advancements provide a user-friendly VW platform that supports advanced analysis, modeling, and visualization activities and is based on robust CI that enables data preservation, data assimilation, and data and model interoperability.
3. Workforce Development and Education: Engage university faculty and graduate students in interdisciplinary team-based watershed research, and broaden undergraduate student participation in STEM through modeling and visualization. The Consortium supports: graduate workforce development through a series of institutes and research activities that provide interdisciplinary training and workforce preparation; and two cohorts of diverse undergraduates and their faculty mentors that acquire and use skills in modeling and visualization to create education modules that can be incorporated into curricula.
WC-WAVE collaborations and impacts are sustained beyond the award via collaborative research projects; incorporation of data and models in open-community-based data centers and code repositories; and CI adoption by State programs.
Intellectual Merit:
Mountain watersheds provide a large proportion of water and ecosystem services to communities in the intermountain west. Climate change impacts affect the ability of watersheds to provide hydrological services such as water storage, flow moderation, and water quality improvement. Interactions among precipitation, vegetation growth, fire regime, soil moisture, runoff, and other landscape properties create systems in which even subtle changes in climate may lead to complex responses and cascading impacts. Integration of creative observation and analytical strategies using advanced modeling approaches and CI made possible in a virtual watershed framework is critical to understanding and predicting complex responses to climate and hydrologic change. WC-WAVE CI enables increased understanding of watershed dynamics in the western US by allowing researchers to: easily acquire and integrate data, use an integrated suite of models to discover processes linking components of the hydrologic cycle, to identify environmental consequences of hydrologic changes, and to visualize and interpret data and model results. The VW framework capabilities will simulate watershed drivers and dynamics and lead to new discoveries.
Broader Impacts:
Immersive virtual reality environments provide platforms that foster interdisciplinary discussion and creative insight into complex scientific questions and enable innovations that result in groundbreaking discoveries. Further, developing three-dimensional thinking skills is an important goal for science education. The Workforce Development and Education program focuses on: (1) implementing an NSF IGERT-like program that prepares graduate students to work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams to effectively address complex scientific issues, (2) promoting undergraduate faculty professional development and preparing diverse undergraduates for future STEM education and/or employment, and (3) developing education modules that can be incorporated in undergraduate curricula. These activities are leading to a workforce that is prepared to tackle STEM challenges requiring interdisciplinary collaboration and computational thinking skills.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
A Western Consortium (WC) consisting of scientists and engineers from Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico successfully completed a Watershed Analysis, Visualization and Exploration project (WC-WAVE) resulting in a physically-based, virtual watershed platform (VWP). The WC-WAVE team recognized that integrating their experimental knowledge and computational skills could provide innovative to help themselves and others who study the complex problems facing watershed science. To ensure that the resulting VWP applied the best data management, visualization techniques and tools, a team of faculty and students with computational expertise and watershed processes and modeling expertise worked collaboratively on common goals. The ultimate goal of the project was to provide the computational and visualization tools necessary to better understand the hydrological impact of changing climate on snow-dominated watersheds in the Western U.S. Instead of starting with a computer-generated simulation of a watershed to develop the VWP, actual watersheds in all three states—Dry and Reynolds Creeks in Idaho, Lehman Creek in Nevada and the Jemez River watershed in New Mexico—were used as the basis for VWP development. Information about the characteristics of these four watersheds was ingested into the data management system and converted into formats required for both computer modeling efforts and VWP development. Watershed scientists collaborated with computer science experts to develop software that connects the results of individual model runs and a complementary suite of applications to see the results visually. The long-term goal of the VWP is to expand this product for use beyond the models used in this project to any model and environmental parameter of interest to scientists seeking to visualize their data and modeling results. The resulting VWP allows watershed scientists to not only access and model data, it also provides a means to visualize data and model results across time (e.g., past and future) and space (e.g. different locations within a landscape).
The WC-WAVE project enhanced research capacity for 80 total participants from 13 different academic institutions across the three states. The project gave both undergraduates and graduate students the opportunity to learn about watershed processes, to model the impact of climate on those processes, and to develop computer data management and visualization tools. One of the significant training efforts of this project was the Undergraduate Visualization and Modeling Network (UVMN), which provided an opportunity for faculty and graduate students to mentor 24 faculty and 26 undergraduates from Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) such as Mesalands Community College and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico. Key results from this effort included the development of a virtual watershed sandbox as a portable educational tool to demonstrate the effect of topography on surface water flow. It is also used for training in the use of geographic information systems to overlay and analyze various environmental conditions. The UVMN team estimates that the training they received, and in turn disseminated to other PUIs and people from the general public, has now reached at least 5,000 individuals.
Project activities will sustain into the future, and the teams have already deployed another instance of the VWP in Idaho. In addition, they have hired post-doctoral scholars and recruited new graduate students to continue VWP improvements, explore new watershed model efforts, and use the VWP within the classroom to train new computer and watershed science students.
Overall, this project produced 61 journal articles or conference proceedings and 52 professional presentations. Ten undergraduate and 23 graduate students engaged in the project successfully completed degrees.
Last Modified: 10/19/2017
Modified by: William K Michener
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Image Title: VWP_TerrainViewVirtual Watershed Platform user interface and visualization tools in terrain viewLynn FenstermakerCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerVWP_TerrainView -
Virtual Watershed Platform trend graph showing model data at a specific pointLynn FenstermakerCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerVWP_ModelTrendView -
Sierra Nevada College faculty and students demonstrating their virtual watershed sandboxMichele CasellaCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerVirtualSandbox -
Virtual Vs Actual WatershedLynn FenstermakerCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerVirtual-Actual_Watershed -
Stream flow measurement training at Valles Caldera, NMLynn FenstermakerCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerStreamFLowMeas_VallesCalderaNM_2014 -
Great Basin National Park Ecologist explains data on Lehman Creek Watershed to WC-WAVE students and facultyLynn FenstermakerCopyrightedWilliam K MichenerLehmanCreekTourNV_2015
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