Newswise — Many fast-growing areas outside Chicago rely solely on rapidly diminishing groundwater, yet water protection guidelines have been hard to implement because they rely on complex, mathematically based models that stakeholders may not understand or trust, says a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a two-year grant of nearly $250,000 to Moira Zellner, assistant professor of urban planning and policy, and a team of researchers in urban planning, computer science, education and biology, to devise visualization tools that will help stakeholders manage water resources in the Chicago region.
"Government agencies use stakeholder committees to ensure that diverse interests are represented," Zellner said. But the committee members “often are not trained to understand the tools that represent the complexity of human-environmental issues.”
Zellner’s team will determine how two visualization tools -- agent-based modeling and geographic information systems -- can help citizens understand how the interactions between land and water management practices can affect the availability of water.
"With GIS, we help stakeholders understand how various features and decisions might play out in space," Zellner said. "With agent-based modeling, stakeholders can explore the interactions of decisions as they play out in both space and time, which often lead to unintended consequences."
Agent-based modeling software allows the user to manipulate hundreds or thousands of "agents" that represent aspects of water resources and explore the effects of "if-then" decisions, Zellner said.
"Agent-based modeling may broaden each stakeholder's focus," Zellner said. “We hope it will persuade stakeholders that groundwater is a vulnerable good that they must share, not a fungible good that they can possess exclusively.”
Other researchers include Leilah Lyons, assistant professor of computer science; William Dieber, director of UIC's Urban Data Visualization Lab; Charles Hoch, professor of urban planning and policy; Andrew Johnson, associate professor of computer science; Emily Minor, assistant professor of biological sciences; and Josuha Radinsky, associate professor of curriculum and instruction.
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NOTE: Please refer to the institution as the University of Illinois at Chicago on first reference and UIC on second reference. "University of Illinois" and "U. of I." are often assumed to refer to our sister campus in Urbana-Champaign.
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