Methodologies for transforming data to information and advancing the understanding of water resources systems towards integrated water resources management

2017 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The majority of river basins in the world, have undergone a great deal of transformations in terms of infrastructure and water management practices in order to meet increasing water needs due to population growth and socio-economic development. Surface water and groundwater systems are interwoven with environmental and socio-economic ones. The systems' dynamic nature, their complex interlinkages and interdependencies are inducing challenges for integrated water resources management. Informed decision-making process in water resources is deriving from a systematic analysis of the available data with the utilization of tools and models, by examining viable alternatives and their associated tradeoffs under the prism of a set of prudent priorities and expert knowledge. In an era of increasing volume and variety of data about natural and anthropogenic systems, opportunities arise for further enhancing data integration in problem-solving approaches and thus support decision-making for water resources planning and management. Although there is a plethora of variables monitored in various spatial and temporal scales, particularly in the United States, in real life, for water resources applications there are rarely, if ever, perfect data. Developing more systematic procedures to integrate the available data and harness their full potential of generating information, will improve the understanding of water resources systems and assist at the same time integrated water resources management efforts. The overarching objective of this study is to develop tools and approaches to overcome data obstacles in water resources management. This required the development of methodologies that utilize a wide range of water and environmental datasets in order to transform them into reliable and valuable information, which would address unanswered questions about water systems and water management practices, contributing to implementable efforts of integrated water resources management. More specifically, the objectives of this research are targeted in three complementary topics: drought, water demand, and groundwater supply. In this regard, their unified thread is the common quest for integrated river basin management (IRBM) under changing water resources conditions. All proposed methodologies have a common area of application namely the South Platte basin, located within Colorado. The area is characterized by limited water resources with frequent drought intervals. A system's vulnerability to drought due to the different manifestations of the phenomenon (meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, socio-economic and ecological) and the plethora of factors affecting it (precipitation patterns, the supply and demand trends, the socioeconomic background etc.) necessitates an integrated approach for delineating its magnitude and spatiotemporal extent and impacts. Thus, the first objective was to develop an implementable drought management policy tool based on the standardized drought vulnerability index framework and expanding it in order to capture more of drought's multifaceted effects. This study illustrated the advantages of a more transparent data rigorous methodology, which minimizes the need for qualitative information replacing it with a more quantitative one. It is believed that such approach may convey drought information to decision makers in a holistic manner and at the same time avoid the existing practices of broken linkages and fragmentation of reported drought impacts. Secondly, a multi-scale (well, HUC-12, and county level) comparative analysis framework was developed to identify the characteristics of the emergent water demand for unconventional oil and gas development. This effort revealed the importance of local conditions in well development patterns that influence water demand, the magnitude of water consumption in local scales in comparison to other water uses, the strategies of handling flowback water, and the need for additional data, and improved data collection methods for a detailed water life-cycle analysis including the associated tradeoffs. Finally, a novel, easy to implement, and computationally low cost methodology was developed for filling gaps in groundwater level time series. The proposed framework consists of four main components, namely: groundwater level time series; data (groundwater level, recharge and pumping) from a regional physically-based groundwater flow model; autoregressive integrated moving average with external inputs modeling; and the Ensemble Smoother (ES) technique. The methodology's efficacy to predict accurately groundwater levels was tested by conducting three numerical experiments at eighteen alluvial wells. The results suggest that the framework could serve as a valuable tool in gaining further insight of alluvium aquifer dynamics by filling missing groundwater level data in an intermittent or continuous (with relative short span) fashion. Overall, it is believed that this research has important implications in water resources decision making by developing implementable frameworks which advance further the understanding of water systems and may aid in integrated river basin management efforts

Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis

Historical sources documenting recurrent plagues of the “Second Pandemic” usually focus on urban epidemic mortality. Instead, plague persists in remote, rural hinterlands: areas less visible in the written sources of late medieval Europe. Plague spreads as fleas move from relatively resistant rodents, which serve as “maintenance hosts,” to an array of more susceptible rural mammals, now called “amplifying hosts.” Using sources relevant to plague in thinly populated Central and Western Alpine regions, this paper postulates that Alpine Europe could have been a region of plague persistence via its population of wild rodents, particularly the Alpine marmot

IDEAS-1997-2021-Final-Programs

This document records the final program for each of the 26 meetings of the International Database and Engineering Application Symposium from 1997 through 2021. These meetings were organized in various locations on three continents. Most of the papers published during these years are in the digital libraries of IEEE(1997-2007) or ACM(2008-2021)

The Nature, Causes, Effects and Mitigation of Climate Change on the Environment

This book examines global warming and climate change over the past five decades in mainly subtropical and tropical countries. The amount and types of changes in these countries vary with the environment but are often less than those occurring in the Arctic and northern countries. Chapters address such topics as the controversy surrounding global warming, the effects of climate change on agriculture, changes in land use and hydrology, and more

Managing developing landscapes for stormwater, water yield, and ecosystem services with data-driven approaches

Includes bibliographical references.2022 Fall.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

The Medieval Globe 1 (2014) - Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end? Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is the first to synthesize the new evidence and research methods that are providing fresh answers to these crucial questions. It was only in 2011, thanks to ancient DNA recovered from remains unearthed in London’s East Smithfield cemetery, that the full genome of the plague pathogen was identified. This single-celled organism probably originated 3000-4000 years ago and has caused three pandemics in recorded history: the Justinianic (or First) Plague Pandemic, around 541-750; the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic), conventionally dated to the 1340s; and the Third Plague Pandemic, usually dated from around 1894 to the 1930s. This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sci­ences to address the question of how recent work in genetics, zoology, and epi­de­miology can enable a rethinking of the Black Death\u27s global reach and its larger historical significance. It forms the inaugural double issue of The Medieval Globe, a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This issue of The Medieval Globe is published with the support of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh

TMG 1 (2014): Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green

The plague organism (Yersinia pestis) killed an estimated 40% to 60% of all people when it spread rapidly through the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the fourteenth century: an event known as the Black Death. Previous research has shown, especially for Western Europe, how population losses then led to structural economic, political, and social changes. But why and how did the pandemic happen in the first place? When and where did it begin? How was it sustained? What was its full geographic extent? And when did it really end? Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World is the first book to synthesize the new evidence and research methods that are providing fresh answers to these crucial questions. It was only in 2011, thanks to ancient DNA recovered from remains unearthed in London’s East Smithfield cemetery, that the full genome of the plague pathogen was identified. This single-celled organism probably originated 3000-4000 years ago and has caused three pandemics in recorded history: the Justinianic (or First) Plague Pandemic, around 541-750; the Black Death (Second Plague Pandemic), conventionally dated to the 1340s; and the Third Plague Pandemic, usually dated from around 1894 to the 1930s. This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sci­ences to address the question of how recent work in genetics, zoology, and epi­de­miology can enable a rethinking of the Black Death\u27s global reach and its larger historical significance. It forms the inaugural double issue of The Medieval Globe, a new journal sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This issue of The Medieval Globe is published with the support of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1000/thumbnail.jp

Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World

This ground-breaking book brings together scholars from the humanities and social and physical sciences to address the question of how recent work in the genetics, zoology, and epidemiology of plague's causative organism (Yersinia pestis) can allow a rethinking of the Black Death pandemic and its larger historical significance