NTRES 6240 - Sustainable Water Resource Management in the Face of Climate Change

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: graduate students or permission of instructor. Co-meets with NTRES 3240.

R.L. Schneider.

In-depth analyses of those ecological and biological principles relevant to the sustainable management of global fresh and marine water resources. Lectures and discussion integrate scientific literature with current management issues, including water supply, dams, irrigation, and groundwater overdraft, and coastal development. Topics include linkages between hydrologic variability and communities, groundwater-surface connections, flow paths for dispersal, patchily distributed water resources, and water quality controls on organisms, and adaptations to climate change.Students taking the course for graduate credit are required to meet one additional day each week outside the normal class times in order to participate in a collaborative graduate group project, which includes reading supplemental materials, weekly discussions, data collection/synthesis and write-up.

Outcome 1: Gain an increased understanding of the complex dimensions of applied, real-world water challenges.

Outcome 2: Gain experience working successfully in an interdisciplinary team setting on all the steps of a contemporary water challenge, starting with identification of an appropriate problem and ending with creation of a report and/or presentation or other appropriate product(s) which summarizes their conclusions and recommendations.

Outcome 3: Be exposed to relevant literature/web sources and increase their understanding of the current literature covering multidisciplinary perspectives and solutions to the selected water topic.

Outcome 4: Learn how to identify the range of relevant options to the selected water resource problem, and specifically learn how to apply sustainable, ecologically-based solutions.

Outcome 5: Learn to communicate and work collaboratively in a team setting with students representing engineering, landscape architecture, economics, ecology, regional planning and other relevant stakeholder disciplines (varies annually) in order to identify sustainable, collaborative solutions to the water problem. This outcome is particularly important and takes considerable effort as students entering the course speak different disciplinary jargons, frequently have no overlapping training, and build off of different philosophical frameworks associated both with their own personal backgrounds and with their respective disciplines.