Category: August 2021

Upcoming First Forum of the New Master Watershed Conservationist Program to Discuss Visions for the Future of the Hatch and Mesilla Valley Watershed

By Dr. Connie Maxwell, NM WRRI Post-Doctoral Researcher

The forum, The Future of our Watershed in the Hatch and Mesilla Valleys, kicks off the first event of a new Master Watershed Conservationist program on September 9^th, at 6:30 p.m., as an online zoom event (click here for link, and here for program information and to register). This first forum is open to the public and will feature a panel of local ecological and resource specialists who will engage in discussions with the audience on visions for the future and the needs for watershed stewardship in New Mexico’s most southern Rio Grande watershed region. Dr. Connie Maxwell from the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NM WRRI), who has spearheaded this first session, will provide an overview of watershed issues for the region and moderate the panel, which will include: Gary Esslinger, Elephant Butte Irrigation District; Jeff Witte, NM Department of Agriculture; Gill Sorg, City Councilor, City of Las Cruces; Kevin Bixby, Supervisor, Doña Ana Soil and Water Conservation District (DASWCD) and Southwest Environmental Center Director;  John Gwynne, Doña Ana County Flood Commission; Don McClure, Bureau of Land Management, and Steve Wilmeth, a local rancher with extensive rangeland conservationist experience. This first forum event will also introduce the Master Watershed Conservationist program, which aims to empower citizens to promote stewardship of our local watersheds. Through the series of eight forums scheduled over the next nine months, the program will also engage volunteers in making decisions and implementing conservation projects in New Mexico’s southern Rio Grande watershed. Ten community organizations have joined with the DASWCD to organize the volunteer program, including NM WRRI, City of Las Cruces, Doña Ana County Flood Commission, Caballo Soil and Water Conservation District, Elephant Butte Irrigation District, Natural Resource Conservation Service, New Mexico State University Extension, Paso del Norte Watershed Council, Rio Grande Theater, and Spring Rains Consulting.

This program comes at an important time for the Hatch and Mesilla Valley region, as increasing watershed health can help build resiliency, giving both the ecosystem and the community greater capacity to face significant current challenges. Drought and high temperatures are increasing aridity, which is drying upland soils and stressing vegetation and rangeland health. Less upland vegetation results in less infiltration of monsoonal rains, which then leads to increased floods that erode and carry soils into the Rio Grande valley and overwhelm agricultural and flood infrastructure. This forum is convened in partnership with the Hatch and Mesilla Valley Watershed Plan – a South Central NM Stormwater Management Coalition project with planning efforts led by NM WRRI – to inform the watershed plan with the visions, ideas, data, and issues discussed at this evening event. Many partners are joining together in this watershed planning effort to address the root of this region’s issues through building up watershed health, identifying needs for innovations, and crafting plans for short-term priorities and long-term resilience. NM WRRI is contributing to this effort and meeting improved watershed goals through leading upland and urban green infrastructure restoration projects to slow and spread flood flows to restore vegetation, reduce flood energy and erosion, and recharge soil moisture and downstream aquifers. These projects will provide key data that will help our team estimate the restoration practices’ effects. We use these estimates in innovative tools we have created to identify the best spots for restoration, how much is required to achieve goals, and what the effects could be of large-scale implementation on the regional water conditions (Maxwell et al., 2021; NMWRRI, 2020).

The Master Watershed Conservationist programs will be conducted in live online Zoom events until in-person options become more possible, which will then follow COVID health guidelines. For more information, go to the DASWCD website page for the program: https://daswcd.org/master-watershed-conservation-program/

References:

Maxwell, C.M., Fernald, A.G., Cadol, D., Faist, A.M., King, J.P., 2021. Managing flood flow connectivity to landscapes to build buffering capacity to disturbances: An ecohydrologic modeling framework for drylands. J. Environ. Manage. 278, 111486.

NMWRRI, 2020. Statewide Water Assessment. Statewide Water Assessment. https://nmwrri.nmsu.edu/statewide-water-assessment/ (accessed 3/9/2021).

NMT Student Awarded Research Grant to Study the Volumetric and Chemical Influence of Groundwater on the Rio Grande

By Marcus Gay, NM WRRI Senior Student Program Coordinator

Groundwater contributions to surface flows (e.g., irrigation returns, lateral basin flow paths) can provide significant base flow in the Rio Grande. As flow paths exit the basin and converge, the solute from each distinct source contributes to the chemical evolution of the riparian aquifer and the river. For example, Hogan et al. (2007) found that deep upwelling groundwater is the primary source of salinization in the Rio Grande. Quantifying the proportions of these distinct groundwater contributions to the Rio Grande hydrologic system could help evaluate the system’s resilience in the face of increased water stress.

NM WRRI has awarded New Mexico Tech graduate student, Ethan Williams, a Student Water Research Grant to study the volumetric and chemical influence of groundwater on the Rio Grande in the southern Albuquerque Basin. The project entitled, Quantifying groundwater to surface water exchanges in the Belen reach of the MRGCD, has three objectives: (1) to identify the proportion and provenance of groundwater contributions in the study area, (2) to record how these fluxes change through the 2021 water year, and (3) to integrate the results into the hydrogeologic context of the basin.

Under the guidance of his faculty advisor, Dr. Alex Rinehart, Williams will collect water samples and flow data at strategic locations in the project area and perform end-member mixing analysis (EMMA). Williams will then calculate volumetric source contributions, develop conceptual flow models for the study, and present his findings within the context of the current literature.

Williams expects the findings to clarify groundwater’s role in maintaining and supplementing flow in the Rio Grande in the southern Albuquerque Basin. According to Williams, “this work aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how, where, and when distinct groundwaters contribute to the Rio Grande. This data will have significant implications for meeting compact obligations, maintaining riparian habitat, and supporting beneficial water use. By evaluating individual groundwater sources, we will characterize how distinct groundwaters affect the chemical evolution of the river and the spatial distribution of individual inputs. These findings will help us accurately anticipate the effects of drought on issues like river salinization and inform our ability to deploy mitigation strategies.” Williams has submitted an abstract about this research to the Geological Society of America Fall Conference in Portland, Oregon. He will also present a poster on this topic at the 66^th Annual New Mexico Water Conference.

Originally from Oak Park, Illinois, Williams graduated in 2018 from the University of New Mexico with a BS in Geology. After working for a consulting company on a groundwater monitoring project in northeastern New Mexico, Williams enrolled in the Department of Hydrology at New Mexico Tech where he plans to graduate with an MS in Hydrology next year. After graduation, Williams plans to pursue a career in water where he hopes to “develop and maintain safe and sustainable water sources in water-stressed regions.”

Meet the Researcher, Kathryn Olszowy, Assistant Professor, New Mexico State University

By Jeanette Torres, NM WRRI Program Coordinator

This month for Meet the Researcher we had the pleasure of interviewing Kathryn Olszowy, an assistant professor for the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University (NMSU) since 2019. She teaches several courses including biological anthropology, human health and biological variation, and evolutionary medicine. According to Olszowy, the most crucial aspect of teaching is to help students improve their scientific literacy and assist them in understanding social and structural factors that shape human health and wellness. She also emphasizes the importance of encouraging students to grow in their confidence, knowledge, and skills. Helping students realize their potential in creative and productive research outlets is one of the main reasons she values her role as a mentor to any interested undergraduate and graduate students.

One of Kathryn’s students, Hailey Taylor, was recently awarded a New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute (NM WRRI) Student Water Research Grant for the project entitled, Living with Water-Insecurity: How do people adapt and cope with poor water quality and access?. This research will investigate how residents of colonias in Doña Ana County, New Mexico adapt and cope with inadequate water quality/supply. This study will then examine the potential mental and physical impacts limited water can have on individuals living in these underdeveloped communities along the US-Mexico border. Olszowy comments that Hailey is not only interested in measuring people’s own perceptions of water insecurity but also what they would like to see as possible solutions. This research is a part of Kathryn’s more extensive research study funded by The Mountain West Clinical and Translational Research Infrastructure Network (MW CTR-IN). Further information on Hailey’s study can be found in NM WRRI’s July eNews article located here.

Kathryn earned her BA (2007) from Colorado State University in Fort Collins and MA (2009) in Anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her MS in Biomedical Anthropology (2011) and her PhD (2014) in Anthropology from Binghamton University located in New York. From there, Olszowy continued her education and acquired her MPH (2019) from Cleveland State University in Ohio.

Kathryn’s research and teaching interests center around an assortment of different areas, including human biocultural variation and adaptation, intergenerational transmission of poor health, and food and water insecurity. With her background in obesity and chronic disease research, she is involved in several concurrent projects, with water research being one of the most recent additions to her repertoire. Some of her projects include looking at the role stress plays in male/female obesity disparities, and performing studies on the physical and mental health outcomes associated with population displacement due to natural disasters. She is also working on a project with her colleague, Dr. Mary Alice Scott, a medical anthropologist, documenting experiences given by people living in rural communities in Doña Ana County during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kathryn “became interested in water research after a plenary session held at the Human Biology Association meeting in 2019. The session was called, Life and Death: Human Biology and Water, and highlighted the fact that water is an understudied aspect of human biology, even though it is essential to us socially and physiologically.” This encouraged her to investigate possible correlations between household water insecurity and the risk of developing conditions like obesity and diabetes. Olszowy states that there is very little literature describing these relationships and believes this kind of research is critical in the U.S. border region due to issues with water scarcity and tensions between industry (e.g., agriculture and oil), community, and individual needs. To help fill in the gaps between water and health research, The MW CTR-IN funded Olszowy with a pilot grant for her research entitled, Water Insecurity: A neglected social determinant of chronic disease risk (2019), which is an integral part of Hailey Taylor’s research as described above. In this study, a survey of colonia residents in Doña Ana County was conducted regarding their experiences of water insecurity and how it impacts their diet, mental health, and potentially chronic disease risk. Once completed, this project will help provide insight for further research associated with water uncertainty and its possible connection to people developing mental and physical health risks.

In addition to her research responsibilities, Olszowy is involved in several university and community service efforts. She is a member of the NMSU COVID-19 Vaccine Tiger Team and assists the Department of Anthropology as their Darwin Day Coordinator and as a member of the Assessment Committee. Within her community, she has volunteered to help with rural food distribution, fundraising, and was an AmeriCorps service member for their cancer services program.

Regarding future career goals, Kathryn mentioned she would like to become more involved with applied and community-based participatory research around Las Cruces and southern New Mexico. She aspires for her research “to be relevant to community concerns and contribute to community-driven improvements in health and wellness.” By working more with the community, Olszowy hopes to gain the attention of local community students and interest them in the anthropology field and NMSU programs dedicated to mentoring and research involvement. She would also like to mention that her research would not have been possible without collaborators at the Doña Ana County Department of Health and Human Services.

Kathryn anticipates making more contributions to water research, NMSU, and NM WRRI in the future once in-person research collaborations have fully resumed. She expressed that “because of the pandemic, a lot of opportunities to connect and collaborate were postponed over the past year and a half, so I am eager to explore opportunities with NM WRRI and across NMSU as we start to open up.”

Kathryn stated that one of the most important lessons she learned during the COVID-19 pandemic was to be flexible with research expectations. Next year, she looks forward to applying for larger external grants to further her MW CTR-IN research between water insecurity, mental distress, and food insecurity with the possibility of acquiring funding for additional student involvement.

As a parting message for those looking to enter the research field, Kathryn stressed the importance that “if you have an interest, something that sparks your curiosity, pursue it. Read about it, talk to experts, find where the gaps are.” She believes this is critical in learning how to view problems from multiple dimensions and discover where research still needs to be performed. As experienced firsthand, Olszowy understands that research is not always a neat and orderly process, and making adjustments should be expected.