Studying the future of the Willamette

A team of researchers from Portland State, Oregon State and the University of Oregon have embarked on a five-year study of how human activity and climate change may conspire to create conditions of water scarcity in the Willamette River Basin (WRB).

The National Science Foundation recently awarded a grant of $4.3 million to fund the multi-institutional study, which seeks to develop a predictive model integrating the socioeconomic, hydrologic and ecological functions of the river’s watershed.       

“We are trying to develop a tool to anticipate where water scarcity will occur and how that scarcity will then affect society,” researcher Scott Wells, head of civil engineering at PSU, said.

Historically, the Willamette watershed has been remarkably free of water scarcity, according to researcher Jeffrey McDonnell, professor of hydrology at OSU. But human population growth in the Willamette Valley and the ensuing surge in water demand for agriculture and urban development are increasingly likely to leave some regions high and dry. This will become especially problematic as the region’s climate continues to warm.

“What’s new and unique about this study is that it’s the first comprehensive examination of a whole water system,” McDonnell said.

The researchers will use a computer-modeling framework called Envision, developed by John Bolte, head of the biological and ecological engineering department at OSU. Envision will help the team to predict how the various factors affecting the availability of water in the WRB could play out in the future.

According to McDonnell, the study will draw on preexisting data from such sources as the United States Geological Survey, Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality and OSU’s digital library of natural resources called the Willamette Basin Explorer. 

The WRB, with its rich database of mapped information about water flows, is one of the most thoroughly documented watersheds in the U.S., McDonnell said.

However, the tool that the research team will develop over the next five years for predicting the locations and stages of water scarcity will not be WRB-specific. The team’s goal is to devise a tool whose usefulness is portable and can be applied anywhere in the world, such as in places where watershed information is harder to come by and where water scarcity is a concern.

And since the factors that drive water scarcity will vary based on a location’s climate and land use, any public policies that emerge for confronting them will have to be locally tailored, according to McDonnell.   

“Our goal is not just to do some cool science but to [develop] a tool in the end that can be used for thinking through water policy and water management,” he said.

The research team is working with several stakeholders that include representatives from state and federal agencies, as well as local jurisdictions. Benton Co. in particular has expressed a strong interest in understanding water futures, according to Bolte.

“As the process moves forward, we’ll be identifying more and more of those stakeholder groups around the basin that have an interest in water management,” he said.

It is too early to predict where the flashpoints of water scarcity will occur in the WRB, Wells said.

McDonnell added that where and how these flashpoints will manifest depends on perspective.

From an economic perspective, a flashpoint could involve whether farmers have to modify their cultivation methods as a result of a decrease in irrigation groundwater, according to McDonnell. From a biological perspective, it could involve how changes in the snow accumulation/melt regime affect the spawning habits of salmon in the upper tributaries. And from an engineering perspective, a flashpoint could involve a systemic change in dam management and strategies for streaming.

The researchers submitted the proposal under the NSF’s Water Sustainability and Climate program. Among the 135 submissions, the Willamette water study is one of only three proposals that the foundation decided to fund. ?