Development and Application of a Decision Framework to Support Improved River Basin Water Management

Water management decisions made at local levels may have effects throughout an entire river basin. Water managers need better ways to help identify which decisions have broader implications and to quantify those effects to inform decision making. This dissertation presents a framework providing a basin-wide approach to water management using three studies. The first study developed a software tool to quantify how local changes within a water resources network affect the entire network. A case study was conducted on the Lower Bear River in Utah. The second study quantified the basin-wide effects of reducing return flows from irrigation areas to the river. The reduced return flow indirectly simulated the effects of implementing water conservation. The third study evaluated how storage of conserved water in reservoirs affects a river basin. A case study of the Boise River Basin in Idaho was used in the second and third studies. The first study developed a method to visualize large networks through simple graphics and identify critical water management locations. The second study found that reducing return flows causes decreased river flow, increased reservoir storage use to meet irrigation demands, and increased irrigation shortages. The third study found that storing conserved water can reduce irrigation shortages throughout a basin. A common finding was that downstream water users were the most affected by management changes. Impacts to the entire river basin should be considered when making management decisions at local levels

Identifying stability, topological significance, and redundancies in water resource networks using parallel coordinate plotting

The size and complexity of water resources networks typically require a large number of computationally intensive simulations to test effects of changes in network structure or management. Current tools can only visualize the effects of a few changes. Here, we introduce a new method and tool that uses parallel coordinate plotting to simultaneously visualize large water resources networks plus identify and rank nodes that are (1) stable (their connectivity does not depends on the existence of particular nodes), (2) topologically significant (when removed or added to the network, they cause other nodes to be unstable), and (3) redundant (a node pair that has similar connections). The tool works by calculating node centrality, creating a parallel coordinate plot, calculating pairwise differences between the elements comprising each plot trace, and calculating each node’s stability, topological significance, and redundancy. We apply the tool to the 56-node lower Bear River water system that stretches from southern Idaho to the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Nodes that are connected to only one other node are the least stable, including Great Salt Lake, Malad River, and Evaporation from Hyrum Reservoir. The three most topologically significant nodes are Cutler and the two junctions connecting the South Cache Valley and the Weber branches to the rest of the network. There are five highly redundant node pairs with over 96% of the same connections including the Cache Valley Irrigation and Cache Valley New Municipal and Industrial service areas. These results suggest that the redundant Cache Valley Irrigation service area is a promising source to transfer water from agriculture to urban use. The New Box Elder County Irrigation and South Cache Irrigation service areas have very low topological significance ranks and suggest that these irrigation areas may also be promising sources of water transfers. Results also identify candidate locations to (i) remove dams (reservoirs with low topological significance or high redundancy), (ii) implement conservation measures, develop new alternative supplies, or monitor flows (unstable nodes), and (iii) protect environmental and ecological services (nodes with high topological significance). Future work should incorporate flow direction and magnitude. The tool scales to very large networks and identifies the most promising nodes to subsequently focus computationally-intensive simulation and sensitivity analysis efforts

Predominant and novel de novo variants in 29 individuals with ALG13 deficiency: Clinical description, biomarker status, biochemical analysis, and treatment suggestions

Asparagine-linked glycosylation 13 homolog (ALG13) encodes a nonredundant, highly conserved, X-linked uridine diphosphate (UDP)-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase required for the synthesis of lipid linked oligosaccharide precursor and proper N-linked glycosylation. De novo variants in ALG13 underlie a form of early infantile epileptic encephalopathy known as EIEE36, but given its essential role in glycosylation, it is also considered a congenital disorder of glycosylation (CDG), ALG13-CDG. Twenty-four previously reported ALG13-CDG cases had de novo variants, but surprisingly, unlike most forms of CDG, ALG13-CDG did not show the anticipated glycosylation defects, typically detected by altered transferrin glycosylation. Structural homology modeling of two recurrent de novo variants, p.A81T and p.N107S, suggests both are likely to impact the function of ALG13. Using a corresponding ALG13-deficient yeast strain, we show that expressing yeast ALG13 with either of the highly conserved hotspot variants rescues the observed growth defect, but not its glycosylation abnormality. We present molecular and clinical data on 29 previously unreported individuals with de novo variants in ALG13. This more than doubles the number of known cases. A key finding is that a vast majority of the individuals presents with West syndrome, a feature shared with other CDG types. Among these, the initial epileptic spasms best responded to adrenocorticotropic hormone or prednisolone, while clobazam and felbamate showed promise for continued epilepsy treatment. A ketogenic diet seems to play an important role in the treatment of these individuals