Multi-disciplinary approaches to water systems: introduction to the special column

摘要

As the human population grows, the livelihoods and well-being of a significant portion of humanity will depend even more on the ability of freshwater ecosystems to provide essential services (Voeroesmarty et al., 2010), which will require the maintenance of biodiversity in these freshwater systems (Dudgeon et al., 2006). There are many competing demands on the available water resources, such as potable water, fish and wildlife habitat, agriculture, industrial use, and recreation, that are driven by different sectors; even within a specific sector there can be diverging interests. For example, water management of the Upper Arkansas River in Colorado has been mandated by the 1949 Arkansas River Compact between the US states of Colorado and Kansas which has led to stream-aquifer issues (Taylor and Luckey, 1974), water transfers from agriculture to urban (Howe et al., 1990), and competing recreational uses (Wollmuth et al., 1985; Arkansas Basin Roundtable, 2017). The recent Upper Arkansas Voluntary Flow Management Program tries to balance many users, including recreation by kayakers and rafters who want to maintain streamflow (at the Wellsville gauge) at or greater than 20 m~3/s as well as anglers who want lower flows in the range of 7 to 11 m~3/s to maintain fish habitat (Arkansas Basin Roundtable, 2017). A variety of strategies have been used in an attempt to bridge disciplines, including focusing research on change in hydrology and society (Montanari et al., 2013), socioeconomic vulnerability and adaptation to hydrometeorological extremes (Drobinski et al., 2014), using local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge to understand natural systems (Berkes, 1993), combining data sets from social and physical systems (Fassnacht et al., 2018a; Laituri, P256-P267), and applying poetic inquiry with poetry-based approaches (Fernandez-Gimenez et al., 2019a). However, there is often a mismatch of understanding between different disciplines (Scholten et al., 2007), and research from various perspectives often use varying terminology and rely on different data sets (Fernandez-Gimenez et al., 2019b). Water problems are global and we need new tools and approaches to address them (Huntington, 2000; Kreibich et al., 2017, Krueger et al., 2016). The different disciplines, i.e., social, ecological, and physical (hydrological), have traditionally been examined separately.