Trends, cycles and extreme events pose significant challenges to sustainable management of water resources. Rising sea levels cause more frequent coastal flooding and intrusion of salt water into municipal and agricultural water supplies. Inter-annual and multi-decadal climate cycles challenge our ability to disentangle impacts of variable precipitation and anthropogenic water use on aquatic ecosystems. Extreme floods and droughts, along with chronic nutrient loading, trigger harmful algal blooms in estuaries and inland waters. Such trends, cycles, and extreme events present complex physical and social challenges that require improved scientific understanding and innovative engineering and management solutions.
We invite you to participate in the 5th biennial UF Water Institute Symposium, focused on understanding causes of trends, cycles and extreme events and their consequences for human, agricultural and natural systems. The symposium will bring together individuals from a variety of institutions, disciplines and perspectives. Presentations, poster sessions and panel discussions will focus on new science, technology, and policy that address:
- DRIVERS of and interactions among trends, cycles and extreme events
Global atmospheric, climatic and oceanic cycles, including the El Niño Southern Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, are important drivers of variations in rainfall patterns across the southeastern U.S., changes in drought and flood cycles, and sea level rise along the eastern U.S. coast that is more rapid than the global average. Limited understanding of periodicity and trends in these drivers, feedbacks among drivers, and links to regional and local conditions hamper our ability to model, predict and prepare for dynamic environmental changes. This theme solicits presentations that illustrate the breadth of questions surrounding global climatic and oceanic patterns, the latest understanding of these patterns, and their role as drivers of regional and local-scale changes and extreme events.
Potential Topics:
- Elucidating global drivers including description of tools and techniques
- Analyses of historical and proxy records of local effects due to global events
- Linking global-scale phenomena to regional and local effects
- Methods of obtaining and interpreting data on global drivers and local responses
- Exploring human and social drivers of global environmental change
- Ocean/atmosphere interactions and the influence on rapid climate change
- IMPACTS to coastal, surface water and aquifer systems
Trends, cycles and extreme events are generating diverse impacts on coastal waters, surface water, and groundwater. Long-term atmospheric warming will likely increase evaporation and transpiration, thereby decreasing surface water supplies and intensifying demands on groundwater use. Changes in drought and flood cycles may diminish the ecological resilience of lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands, in turn, making them more susceptible to an increasing number of human-induced stresses. Larger and more frequent pulses of nutrient-enriched freshwater into coastal systems may result in harmful algal blooms, fish kills and die-back of seagrasses. This theme solicits presentations that explore diverse impacts of trends, cycles and extreme events, with a focus on understanding hydrologic implications, ecosystem responses and resilience, and socio-economic consequences.
Potential Topics:
- Evaluation of long-term data records to demonstrate changes in trends, cycles and extreme events in wetland hydro period, streamflow, spring flow, aquifer levels and/or other aquatic ecosystems
- Disentangling the influences of pumping and surface water extraction from climatic influences on hydrologic systems
- Feedbacks and interactions among anthropogenic and climatic impacts on surface and groundwater quality
- Predicting linear versus non-linear responses of ecosystems to trends, cycles and extreme events
- Socio-economic consequences of trends, cycles and extreme events and impacts on water resources
- Emerging Pathogens in Florida Waters
- SOLUTIONS that integrate science, technology, policy and management
There are many complex challenges to sustaining natural ecosystems while meeting human needs for water. These challenges include managing water resources within human-altered landscapes, responding to sea level rise, and adapting to more severe flooding and more prolonged droughts. Adaption to these changes will require innovative solutions that integrate science, technology, policy and management to increase ecosystem resilience to global change and extreme events while providing sufficient clean water for human use. Some of the challenges to developing integrated approaches are lack of adequate coordination among jurisdictions, insufficient funding, and uncertainty regarding the severity of future climatic events. Novel approaches will be needed to update laws, rules, programs and financing, along with refocusing science and technology on evolving global changes. This theme solicits presentations focused on solutions that employ innovative science and technology, create improved policies, generate sufficient financial resources and foster stakeholder engagement to yield sustainable management of water resources.
Potential Topics:
- Simulating the impacts of trends, cycles and events on water supply, natural systems, agriculture and the built environment
- Quantifying and coping with uncertainty
- Quantifying risk perception and response to extreme events
- Revising planning, policy and management to respond appropriately to trends, cycles and extreme events, including mitigation and adaptation strategies, and approaches for responding to extreme events
- Using social, economic and communication science to understand needs, build resilience, inform policy, and improve management of water resources
- Legal, financial and governance approaches to water management
- Crisis management
- Quantifying public health elements (health disparities, mental health, physiological exposure and harm) during and after extreme events
- Fostering and assessing collaboration to effectively deal with natural resource management in social and institutional environments facing accelerating change (stakeholder engagement, social and adaptive learning networks, locally evolved institutional arrangements, organizational flexibility)
- Bridging policy and science to solve water resource problems
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