UC Berkeley Water Research and Opportunities Portal

The course provides a framework to address contemporary water-resources problems, and to achieve water security for local areas and broader regions. Students will become aware of critical water-resources issues at local, national and global scales, and learn to formulate solutions for water-resources problems using engineering, natural-science and social-science tools. The main focus is on California and the Western United States, with comparative analysis for other regions.

Distribution, dynamics, and use of water resources in the global environment. Water scarcity, water rights, and water wars. The terrestrial hydrologic cycle. Contemporary environmental issues in water resource management, including droughts, floods, saltwater intrusion, water contamination and remediation, river restoration, hydraulic fracturing, dams, and engineering of waterways. The role of water in ecosystem processes and geomorphology. How water resources are measured and monitored. Basic water resource calculations. Effects of climate change on water quantity, quality, and timing.

Climate impacts and risk analysis is the study of weather-related catastrophes such as heat waves, floods, droughts, fires, and tropical cyclones, and builds on material from GEOG 149A: Climates of the World.
We will review how large-scale climate and local weather patterns set up, learn detection and attribution to climate change, risk probabilities and the types of impacts incurred.

Distribution, dynamics, and use of water resources in the global environment. Water scarcity, water rights, and water wars. The terrestrial hydrologic cycle. Contemporary environmental issues in water resource management, including droughts, floods, saltwater intrusion, water contamination and remediation, river restoration, hydraulic fracturing, dams, and engineering of waterways. The role of water in ecosystem processes and geomorphology. How water resources are measured and monitored. Basic water resource calculations. Effects of climate change on water quantity, quality, and timing.

Wastewater, Water Reuse, Water Systems, Drinking Water, Sanitation, Pollution, Rural, South Asia, Asia, China, India, North America, California, Water Security, Technology, Nutrient Management, Civil Society, Government, Economy, Development, Resource Distribution

Prof. Gerlein-Safdi is an ecohydrologist interested in understanding water-carbon relations within the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. She uses an array of methods, from satellite data to process-based modeling, from stable isotopes lab experiments to field measurements.

1) Satellite-based mapping of wetlands to improve methane emissions modeling
2) Understanding the effects of soil warming on vegetation water and carbon fluxes
3) Dew and fog as a water resource for vegetation

Inez Fung focuses on climate change and atmospheric science with particular attention towards geophysical fluid dynamics and large-scale numerical modeling, remote sensing of earth systems, atmosphere-ocean interactions, and atmosphere-biosphere interactions. Additionally, she is the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment.

Her current projects center around:
1) Changes in East Asian monsoon precipitation
2) Subsurface water dynamics and tree resilience/mortality to droughts

Dr. Jones’s research uses quantitative Earth system science tools –computer models, uncertainty quantification techniques, etc. – to gain decision-relevant insight into how humans affect the climate and vice versa. Major themes include the “usability” of regional climate projections for adaptation planning, the resilience of energy, water, and food systems to multiple stressors, the role of land use change in efforts to both reduce and adapt to climate change, and the tightly coupled interactions among people, built infrastructure, and environmental processes in urban contexts.

Projects include:
1) Project Hyperion, within which he leads a stakeholder engagement process with water management professionals in four case study basins across the US aimed at evaluating and improving the decision-relevance of high-resolution climate projections for long-range water system planning
2) Efforts to understand urban environmental processes (heat waves, vegetation dynamics, hydrologic flows and their implications for energy and water resources) in the context of changing climate, land use, and demographics.

Albert Ruhi focuses on understanding how freshwater communities and food webs respond to global change, with a special emphasis on the effects of hydrologic alteration and drought.

His projects include:
1) 2019-23 Collaborative Proposal: NSF MSB-FRA: Scaling Climate, Connectivity, and Communities in Streams
2) 2019-20 California Institute for Water Resources (CIWR) Water Research Program. Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of the Multi-Scale Effects of Drought on Riverine Biodiversity
3) 2019-20 California Department of Fish and Wildlife Awards. Reconnecting Delta food webs: evaluating the influence of tidal marsh restoration on energy flow and prey availability for native fishes
4) 2019-20 Subaward from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland. Advancing quantitative methods to understand causal pathways and feedbacks within complex socio-hydrological systems.

Maggi Kelly’s lab group’s motto is “mapping for a changing California”, and they use a range of geospatial data and analytics – from spatial modeling, remote sensing, drones, lidar, historical archives, surveys, participatory mapping, and the field – to gain insights about how and why California landscapes are changing, and what that change means for those who live on, use, and manage our lands.

Nathan Sayre focuses on semi-arid rangelands, especially in the southwestern United States: how they have changed, how they have been understood and managed, and the politics and economics surrounding land use change, fire restoration, and endangered species conservation. His interests include ranching and pastoralism, rangeland ecology and management, history of range science, endangered species, scale, the state, Western environmental history, local ecological knowledge, conservation and urbanization/land use change

One of his projects includes:
1) The California megaflood of 1861-62 and the subsequent drought

Peggy Lemaux focuses on both basic and applied research focused primarily on cereal crops, like sorghum, wheat, rice and barley. The objectives of these studies are to better understand crop plants and to use that knowledge to improve their performance and quality. More recently efforts with colleagues have focused on bioenergy – especially in the versatile feedstock, sorghum.

One of her projects includes:
1) “Epigenetic Control of Drought Response in Sorghum” (EPICON)
A $12.3 million Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Research-funded project to examine how the drought-tolerant cereal crop, sorghum, survives water loss.
Researchers expect to develop better predictions about how sorghum and other cereal crops are affected by future climate scenarios, leading to approaches to improve crop growth and production under water-limiting conditions.

The Berkeley Water Center seeks to create more resilient, equitable, and sustainable water systems with access to safe water for all by
leveraging Berkeley research to accelerate groundbreaking solutions for
the world’s water problems.

The Berkeley Water Center cultivates, facilitates and supports a broad range of interdisciplinary research projects to address local and global water challenges; builds connections among academia, policy-makers, and practitioners to enable research-driven solutions to emergent water problems; translates and promotes research results for a wide audience to better inform decision-making about water system planning and development; and empowers UC Berkeley students with opportunities, skills and a research community to develop innovative ideas and to become water leaders.

The Berkeley Water Center is supported by the College of Natural Resources and the College of Engineering. Its affiliates work across the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and have a broad range of research interests and expertise, spanning engineered infrastructure and technology development; planning, monitoring and understanding of natural and engineered water systems; understanding of social, institutional and political contexts of water systems; equitable access to water; water law and policy; economics of urban and agricultural water systems; and public health.

ReNUWIt (Re-Inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure) is an interdisciplinary, multi-institution engineering research center. Our goal is to change the ways we manage urban water.

ReNUWIt is the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Center (ERC) for Re-inventing the Nation’s urban Water Infrastructure. Launched in 2011, ReNUWIt is the first ERC dedicated to civil infrastructure and water systems. ReNUWIt encompasses a diverse team of researchers who collaborate with entrepreneurs and practitioners on innovative solutions for urban water infrastructure challenges.

The Wheeler Water Institute contributes robust analysis and forward-looking policy recommendations to directly inform decision-making. Anchored by our unique blend of legal, policy, and technical expertise, we bring clarity and actionable research to a famously challenging field. Established in 2012 at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) at Berkeley Law, the Institute conducts projects at the intersection of law, policy and science.