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Ecoregions

The Willamette Water 2100 Project

Oregon State University (OSU), the University of Oregon (UO), and Portland State University (PSU) are collaborating on a comprehensive, highly integrated examination of hydrological, ecological, and socio-economic factors in the Willamette River Basin. The team is applying Envision, a theoretical framework developed at OSU, to evaluate how climate change, population growth, and economic growth will alter the availability and the use of water in the Willamette River Basin. Envision provides a computing environment in which state-of-the-art hydrological, ecological, and socio-economic models can interact synergistically. Envision also contains a multi-agent-based modeling component that enables it to represent the impact of human decision-making on landscape change. The team has the following objectives:

  1. Identify and quantify the linkages and feedbacks among hydrologic, ecological, and socioeconomic dimensions of the water system.
  2. Determine where and when human activities and climate change will create water scarcities.
  3. Evaluate a broad range of strategies that could enable this region to prevent, mitigate, or adapt to water scarcities.
  4. Create a transferable method of predicting where climate change will create water scarcities in other regions and where those scarcities would exert the strongest impact on society.

The team is collaborating with public officials, resource managers, and other stakeholders with strong interest in protecting ecosystems and water resources. County, state and federal officials are involved to share their needs and perspectives, to identify scenarios, and to interpret results. Working with these public officials, the team will help translate the results of the research into the planning and decision making processes.

In the outyears, the team will transfer tools to other basins. They will work with the Institute for Water Education, to transfer Envision to researchers in UNESCO HELP basins, with a focus on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia.

The project uses Envision a modeling framework developed by John Bolte and colleagues at OSU and the UO. Envision integrates: a geographic information system that manages data in space and time, an interface that allows separate hydrologic, ecological, and socio-economic models to “plug in”, a modeling system that can represent independent decision making for separate parcels of the landscape, a system to visualize alternative future scenarios and changes in data sets under those scenarios.

Read more about the Willamette Water 2100 project.

 

 

The project uses Envision a modeling framework developed by John Bolte and colleagues at OSU and the UO. Envision integrates: a geographic information system that manages data in space and time, an interface that allows separate hydrologic, ecological, and socio-economic models to “plug in”, a modeling system that can represent independent decision making for separate parcels of the landscape, a system to visualize alternative future scenarios and changes in data sets under those scenarios.

 

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