Suzanne A. Pierce

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)

Groundwater availability is at the core of hydrogeology as a discipline and, simultaneously, the concept is the source of ambiguity for management and policy. Aquifer yield has undergone multiple definitions resulting in a range of scientific methods to calculate and model availability reflecting the complexity of combined scientific, management, p...

Groundwater models that include causal links to community preferences and concerns can aid policy negotiations during a consensus building process among stakeholders. To bring groundwater concerns and observe the feasibility of policy options in community deliberations, a decision support system (DSS) was constructed that allows active mediation to...

Global energy consumption is expected to grow by 50% by 2030, squeezing already scarce water resources. Mike Hightower and Suzanne A. Pierce recommend ways to integrate water and energy planning.

In this position paper, we use the example of The University of Texas at Austin’s Planet Texas 2050 (PT2050) to argue that the Grand Challenge (GC) framework for ambitious research initiatives must create meeting grounds for transdisciplinary integration of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), arts, and humanities, along with commu...

Major societal and environmental challenges involve complex systems that have diverse multi-scale interacting processes. Consider, for example, how droughts and water reserves affect crop production and how agriculture and industrial needs affect water quality and availability. Preventive measures, such as delaying planting dates and adopting new a...

Currently, natural resources related datasets for Texas are scattered across disparate data sources and in heterogeneous spatial and temporal resolutions and formats. Frictions related to extraction, processing, and interpretation of data hinder timely decision making activities using this valuable natural resources information. This is especially...

This project extends and expands toolsets that were started under the Water Averaging project for data imputation, scaling, and homogenization (DISH) for Texas natural resources and to support integrated cross‐sector modeling. Spanning a wide range of climatic regimes, Texas relies on water extracted from rivers and aquifers within its own borders....

We look at the intersection of modelling, extreme weather, and emergency response. How do we get from a radar rain map to a stream gauge flood map that can show local flood impacts to emergency responders as quickly as possible? How can we use algorithms to plan for evacuating residents of the Houston-Galveston region during hurricanes and other re...

Concerns over groundwater depletion and ecosystem degradation have led to the incorporation of the concept of groundwater sustainability as a groundwater policy instrument in several water codes and management directives worldwide. Because sustainable groundwater management is embedded within integrated, co-evolving hydrological, ecological, and so...

Given the rapid emergence of data science techniques in the sustainability sciences and the societal importance of many of these applications, there is an urgent need to prepare future scientists to be knowledgeable in both their chosen science domain and in data science. This article provides an overview of required competencies, educational progr...

Understanding the impacts of climate change on natural and human systems poses major challenges as it requires the integration of models and data across various disciplines, including hydrology, agriculture, ecosystem modeling, and econometrics. While tactical situations arising from an extreme weather event require rapid responses, integrating the...

The explosion of IoT devices and sensors in recent years has led to a demand for efficiently storing, processing and analyzing time-series data. Geoscience researchers use time-series data stores such as Hydroserver, VOEIS and CHORDS. Many of these tools require a great deal of infrastructure to deploy and expertise to manage and scale. Tapis's (fo...

This document proposes an overarching modeling problem framework and definitions for terms used in the World Modelers program in TA2-TA3 modeling, also called bottom-up modeling. There are several reasons to propose a shared conceptual framework and terminology. First, there is a high degree of ambiguity in the use of terms such as "scenario", "mod...

By the year 2050, the state of Texas is forecast to increase in population from 28 million to nearly 55 million residents. As a result, the effects of present utilization in the sustainability of natural resources (water, energy, and land-use) must be modeled and made available to policymakers. The Planet Texas 2050 (PT2050) project is designed to...

Overview of how DataX & MINT supports and accelerates research

The fields of meteorology, surface- and groundwater hydrology, and forestry are often decoupled despite the fact that they occur simultaneously at the intersection of living systems and the physical environment. In this work, we describe a system that allows concurrent measurement of canopy throughfall, transpiration, air temperature, pressure, and...

Many aspects of geosciences pose novel problems for intelligent systems research. Geoscience data is challenging because it tends to be uncertain, intermittent, sparse, multiresolution, and multi-scale. Geosciences processes and objects often have amorphous spatiotemporal boundaries. The lack of ground truth makes model evaluation, testing, and com...

Many aspects of geosciences pose novel problems for intelligent systems research. Geoscience data is challenging because it tends to be uncertain, intermittent, sparse, multiresolution, and multi-scale. Geosciences processes and objects often have amorphous spatiotemporal boundaries. The lack of ground truth makes model evaluation, testing, and com...

Regional scale research on resilience in Texas creating a data portal with integrated modeling as a service. Data are stored using labeled multiband tiff formats as an integration strategy.

How much water is in Texas? Where is it? How does it vary over time? Understanding the spatiotemporal variability of water volumes in all forms (atmospheric water, surface water, soil water, and groundwater) is critical for managing water resources as Texas adapts to long-term droughts interspersed with intense floods. However, Texas’ water has his...

Environmental modelling is transitioning from the traditional paradigm that focuses on the model and its quantitative performance to a more holistic paradigm that recognises successful model-based outcomes are closely tied to undertaking modelling as a social process, not just as a technical procedure. This paper redefines evaluation as a multi-dim...

Understanding the interactions between natural processes and human activities poses major challenges as it requires the integration of models and data across disparate disciplines. It typically takes many months and even years to create valid end-to-end simulations as different models need to be configured in consistent ways and generate data that...

The proliferation of low-cost microcontrollers, environmental sensors, and communication capabilities have combined to allow higher time and spatial resolution observation of natural processes. Two limiting factors outside of power constraints have effected increased utilization of the technologies. They are connectivity between devices and needs f...

The Connecting Texas Water Data Workshop brought together experts representative of Texas’ water sectors to engage in the identification of critical water data needs and discuss the design of a data system that facilitates access to and use of public water data in Texas. Workshop participants identified “use cases” that list data gaps, needs, and u...

The effectiveness of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) modeling hinges on the quality of practices employed through the process, starting from early problem definition all the way through to using the model in a way that serves its intended purpose. The adoption and implementation of effective modeling practices need to be guided by a pra...

A research agenda for intelligent systems that will result in fundamental new capabilities for understanding the Earth system.

As geoscientific studies expand to incorporate larger heterogeneous datasets across varying spatio-temporal scales, the need for collaborative and interdisciplinary workflows arises. An interdisciplinary team of students in the geosciences and researchers in intelligent systems analyzed groundwater availability in the Northern Trinity Aquifer in Te...

IS-GEO is an NSF funded Research Coordination Network that aims to support an emerging community of researchers in Intelligent Systems (IS) and Geosciences (GEO). Over the past two years, the IS-GEO community has organized trainings, workshops, and conference sessions for members of both the broader intelligent systems and geosciences communities a...

Model repositories are key resources for scientists in terms of model discovery and reuse, but do not focus on important tasks such as model comparison and composition. Model repositories do not typically capture important comparative metadata to describe assumptions and model variables that enable a scientist to discern which models would be bette...

Geoscience problems are complex and often involve data that changes across space and time. Frequently geoscience knowledge and understanding provides valuable information and insight for problems related to energy, water, climate, mineral resources, and our understanding of how the Earth evolves through time. Simultaneously, many grand challenges i...

Data integration applications are ubiquitous in scientific disciplines. A state-of-the-art data integration system accepts both a set of data sources and a target ontology as input, and semi-automatically maps the data sources in terms of concepts and relationships in the target ontology. Mappings can be both complex and highly domain-specific. Onc...

MODFLOW (MF) has served for decades as a de facto standard for groundwater modelling. Despite successive versions, legacy MF-96 simulations are still commonly encountered cases. Such is the case for many of the groundwater availability models of the State of Texas. Unfortunately, even the existence of converters to MF's newer versions has not neces...

Purpose Existing assessment and decision support tools have limited application to real-world food-energy-water (FEW) Nexus challenges. Integrated assessment approaches are often discipline-specific or highly theoretical, lacking grounding in real-world FEW issues. Recent Findings FEW systems require application of integrated techniques that addre...

Similar to other modelling methodologies, the potential of system dynamics to contribute to system understanding and decision making depends upon the practices applied by the modeller. However lessons about many of these practices are often unreported. This paper contributes to the methodology of system dynamics modelling of socio-ecological system...

There are substantial challenges facing humanity in the water and related sectors and purposeful integration of the disciplines, connected sectors and interest groups is now perceived as essential to address them. This article describes and uses bibliometric analysis techniques to provide quantitative insights into the general landscape of Integrat...

This study presents a big data analysis of multiple recharge interpretations and pumping regimes in the context of stakeholder preferences and desired future conditions for the Barton Springs segment of the Edwards aquifer. A set of candidate solutions was generated using a simulation-optimization model and aquifer responses were tested using multi...

Geoscientists now live in a world rich with digital data and methods, and their computational research cannot be fully captured in traditional publications. The Geoscience Paper of the Future (GPF) presents an approach to fully document, share, and cite all their research products including data, software, and computational provenance. This article...

Information and knowledge management challenges abound in groundwater sciences. Groundwater problems of interest to society are characteristically complex and exceed our ability to solve them without the aid of computational analysis. Yet discipline specific problems that are of interest to hydrogeologists frequently do not directly address the imm...

Quantifying groundwater availability depends upon sound methods and the use of integrated models. To determine availability or sustainable yield, the influence of scientific uncertainty from key sources, such as anthropogenic recharge, must be considered. This study evaluates uncertainty in recharge interpretations on the modeled available water b...

in Volume 2, Pages 603-1213, Sessions C1-F5, Ames, D.P., Quinn, N.W.T., Rizzoli, A.E. (Eds.), 2014. Proceedings of the 7th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software, June 15-19, San Diego, California, USA. ISBN: 978-88-9035-744-2

The ENCOMPASS cyberinfrastructure provides a systems view of energy, environmental, and earth resource issues with the goal of spanning boundaries: across centers of knowledge, disciplines, cultures, technologies, resource type, and global hemispheres. Based on the premise that a sociotechnical platform to share and communicate between scientists,...

: Water conflict arises in interconnected ways. As demand increases in one region or industrial sector, the accompanying shifts in water resource management regimes have impacts at the local level and may carry international implications. Insecure water resources are often the root cause of resistance or social conflict across many political and ec...

Integrated Aquifers Management (IAM) demands innovative tools and methods that are able to consider as much perspectives as possible. This research is aimed to design, apply and provide an indicator named Social Sustainable Aquifer Yield (SSAY), expressed in units of time that includes pure hydrological variables as well as social ones. The indicat...

Complex, dynamic, and ill-structured problems tend to defy strictly technical solutions and also exceed the human capacity to solve them unaided. ENCOMPASS is a cyberinfrastructure initiative to make energy and earth science accessible. The platform merges scientific models, algorithms, and informatics with educational modules, citizen science, rea...

Urbanization alters the character and state of the land surface. Urban-induced anthropogenic recharge sources that include leaky utility lines, storm sewer systems, and storm-water catchments, as well as over-irrigation of lawns, parks, and golf courses, can be significant. However, data may be sparse and quantification difficult. A case study for...

Salar de Ascotán and Salar de Carcote are internally drained, evaporative basins located in the Atacama Desert, 200 km northeast of Antofogasta in Region II, Chile. The two salars are part of a regional groundwater system that recharges in the adjacent uplands to the east and terminates in the regional topographic low at Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Th...

Shortening the cycle from data collection to research publications is a competitive advantage for researchers. Existing technologies for inventory systems such as UPC barcoding systems can be coupled with flexible mobile or handheld devices to advance efficiency, productivity, automation, and integrity in data flows, from data collection to sample...

Energy and water are interlinked. The development, use, and waste generated by demand for both resources drive global change. Managing them in tandem offers potential for global-change adaptation but presents institutional challenges. This paper advances understanding of the water–energy nexus by demonstrating how these resources are coupled at mul...

Background/Question/Methods Addressing the challenges associated with Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) requires advances and shifts towards systematic and social learning approaches. IWRM engages groups to explore collaborative decision making with the use of simulation-optimization models and decision support systems. As a significant...

Integrated modelling and environmental decision support are increasingly important as society tackles some of the most complex challenges of our generation, with impacts on future generations. When integrated modelling is successful, the results can be transformational yet the core elements for generating that success are not always clear. There is...

The complexity of water resource issues, its interconnectedness to other systems, and the involvement of competing stakeholders often overwhelm decision-makers and inhibit the creation of clear management strategies. While a range of modeling tools and procedures exist to address these problems, they tend to be case specific and generally emphasize...

The Edwards aquifer is a karstic aquifer which discharges naturally to springs that support a number of endangered aquatic species. Past and projected rates of development and urbanization are high as are the political stakes in managing regional growth and water resources in a sustainable manner. Key issues involve how can development occur or wha...

Work in the literature for groundwater allocation emphasizes finding a truly optimal solution, often with the drawback of limiting the reported results to either maximizing net benefit in regional scale models or minimizing pumping costs for localized cases. From a policy perspective, limited insight can be gained from these studies because the res...

Global urban populations and areas are expanding rapidly. Urbanization is a major process shaping the landscape that typically increases ”impervious” cover, alters shallow permeability fields, buries existing stream channels, increases local flooding, creates new sources of contamination, alters local climate, disrupts ecosystems, and increases gro...

The Rapid Prevention of Disputes in Public Policy and Planning (RaPD-3P) Process produced resolution among a large number of stakeholders over resources conflicts in a short period. Resolutions may take decades due to the costs, asymmetric benefits, interests, information asymmetries, scientific uncertainty, rights, and politics. The RaPD-3P proces...

Not available Geological Sciences

It is generally accepted that groundwater systems should not be "over‐allocated" and that extraction should be limited to "sustainable levels" in relation to socioeconomic and environmental considerations. There is, however, substantial uncertainty in determining a sustainable aquifer yield and formulating a water allocation plan. This uncertainty...