Analysis and Modelling of Coupled Human-Nature Processes in Water Resources Systems

About this Research Topic

Background

Human activities modify water resources systems (WRS) through numerous processes (e.g., climate change, water withdrawals, reservoir operations, land use, and land cover change), and are in turn affected by hydrologic as well as socioeconomic and policy factors. These human-nature interactions (HNI) are necessary for explaining the WRS’s dynamics, and inadequate consideration of HNI can lead to unintended consequences or missed synergistic opportunities in decision making. Therefore, many studies on HNI-in-WRS have emerged during the last decade, leading to inter-related fields such as socio-hydrology, hydro-sociology, food-energy-water nexus, and regional integrated assessment modeling. These studies combine knowledge and methods from hydrology, engineering, economics, and other social science to identify the key HNI components and their internal and external drivers in WRS, quantify the system dynamics, and identify solutions to water resources problems.

Despite the large and growing number of studies on HNI-in-WRS, there are opportunities and needs for advancement. These include methodological questions, such as how to harmonize the spatiotemporal scales, processes, and mathematical scheme of the models from traditionally separate disciplines, and what are the pros and cons of the various existing approaches representing the coupled human-natural system. These also include scientific and practical questions, such as which interactions exist, how the interactions drive the co-evolution of the human and natural parts of WRS, and how to engage stakeholders and effect changes in policies and ground practices. Also, the majority of existing studies are driven by hydrologists and economists, and there is a need to involve a broader range of social scientists.

The objective of this Research Topic is to serve as a forum where state-of-art research challenges and advances on HNI-in-WRS can be discussed. Through a collection of articles, this Research Topic aims to promote the generation and the dissemination of new knowledge, and the exchange of knowledge across disciplines. This Research Topic welcomes standard research articles, commentaries, reviews, and meta-analyses that focus on HNI-in-WRS. The WRS of interest can be any geographic region defined by common water resources challenges and can be either surface or groundwater systems, or both. The method of research can be qualitative or quantitative. The submission can focus on the entire system or individual interactions. Some examples are provided below, but the submission is not limited to them:

· Development of new coupled human-hydrologic models or improvements of existing models for a specific WRS
· Intercomparison of different modeling approaches (e.g. model coupling, system dynamics, agent-based modeling, optimization) for the same WRS to reveal the pros and cons, and the predictive or policy-making uncertainties caused by varying the model assumptions
· Analysis of the effects of HNI on the sustainability of the WRS (e.g. resilience to extreme events, climate change adaptation, the Sustainable Development Goals, etc.)
· Analysis of the effects of specific aspects of HNI (e.g. urbanization, energy development, human migration, etc.)
· Case studies that use traditional social science methods to identify the actors and activities in HNI-in-WRS and draw theoretical insights

Keywords: socio-hydrology, integrated water resources management, hydrological modelling, case study, food-energy-water nexus

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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