Five themes listed below are being synergistically organized with corresponding five special issues in Frontiers in Water journal, accepting articles from January 2021 till 30 July 2022. Those who submit articles to any of the special issues before the conference can interact with other contributors during the conference. While those who present at the conference, have not yet submitted their papers and would like to, will have will have nine months after the conference to submit their corresponding articles to the special issues.
THEME 1:
Innovating a New Knowledge Base for Water Justice Studies: Hydrosocial, Sociohydrology, and Beyond
It is clear that natural and social scientists are creating intellectual innovations that are challenging existing water paradigms; however, deep intellectual barriers persist. To advance equity and justice in water system data collection, modeling, and analysis, thinking beyond the epistemological, ontological, methodological, axiological, technological, and psychological differences across the natural and social sciences is key to contribute to eliminating these barriers.
The aim of this Research Topic is to cover new developments in the wide spectrum of sociohydrology and hydrosocial co-practice for more just, equitable, and resilient water systems. We invite modelers to examine the analytical potential of their work; we also invite social scientists to consider the value of their work to develop plausible future scenarios, as well as engage in interdisciplinary collaborations. We are especially interested in case studies of water justice collaborations that bridge transdisciplinary gaps.
This Research Topic is concerned with how sociohydrology studies can capture sociohistorical contexts to better recognize power relations and how hydrosocial research can advance actionable insights and tools that are useful to water managers and decisionmakers.
Some research questions might include the following:
• Exchanges across natural and social approaches to hydro-spaces and socio-ecological systems.
• How and why (or why not?) model water (in) justice, power, positionality, perspectives, vulnerability, culture and spiritual dimensions of water?
• Applications of social theory to hydrological modeling (e.g., water accounting, upstream/downstream fluxes).
• What is the role of scholar-activists in water justice and sociohydrology work?.
• Political ecology of future waterscapes: What do analyses of the past tell us about the future?
• How can socio-hydrologists and hydrosocial scholars integrate frameworks that address multispecies intersectionality and post-humanist water sustainability?
THEME 2:
Scale Issues in Human-Water Systems
Several unsolved problems in hydrology involve changes in the water cycle due to human causes and reversely also changes in human lives due to changing water situations. This underlines the lack in our understanding of the interplay between water and people across scales and levels. Such understanding is crucial for adequately informing actors in multi-level water governance (water users, water managers, chains-actors in the food sector, and others) and to develop knowledge tools to support this (e.g. indicators, models, and serious games). The existing mismatch between governance and water-system scales and levels calls for interdisciplinary efforts involving hydrological and social sciences.
This Research Topic aims at bringing together scale-related contributions to addressing multiple UPH. Progress with regard to overcoming sociohydrological scale issues requires contributions that increase our understanding on the effects of human activities across spatial scale-levels (water use, land use, water management, infrastructure) on hydrological extremes (droughts and floods) and the spatial distribution of water availability in surface- and groundwater resources.
Contributions could involve case studies using both hydrosocial and sociohydrological perspectives on hydrological extremes (floods and droughts), water governance, virtual water transfer, water and the SDGs, transboundary rivers, etc. All contributions should address at least one of the following scale-related topics:
• ‘Sociohydrological laws/processes’ at the catchment scale and the processes across spatial scale-levels that trigger people’s responses (sociohydrological feedback-mechanisms).
• Required spatiotemporal resolution to capture the relevant socio-hydrological dynamics in simulation models, and their implications for different forms of uncertainty.
• Suitability of the scale (extent, resolution) of data obtained from innovative technologies for detecting relevant human activities and their effect.
• Ways to obtain information (at the required spatiotemporal detail) from existing data sources on human and water systems, and from participatory methods (participatory GIS, serious games) to help us in filling in the blanks in sociohydrology.
• Relevant spatial and temporal scale-levels for communicating (the uncertainty in) hydrological predictions, and informing policymakers on the water-related trade-offs and synergies with regard to achieving multiple SDGs.
THEME 3:
Water Resources and Human Behavior: Analysis and Modeling of Coupled Water-Human Systems Feedbacks and Coevolution
Since sociohydrology has been formally introduced as a new theme in hydrology in 2012, literature has been growing, contributing to sociohydrology, mainly through representing the coupling of human-water systems. Human systems are represented by various forms of economics, social dimension, policy , and trade , but mostly based on water and supply-centric approaches where systems are driven by water availability, abundance, or scarcity and the need to manage it wisely. Multi-centric approaches, representing water as an inseparable part of, e.g. water-energy-food nexus, aim to represent the human systems through comprehensive societal need for integrated resources. Also, new studies on demand-centric approaches are making their way into the literature. In all these approaches, the coupling and feedback mechanism of the natural-human systems takes various forms, raising issues of similarities and differences between them and sociohydrology.
In this Research Topic, we aim to present the coupling and the coevolution of water and human systems with all its possible dimensions and single-centric or multi-centric approaches under a comprehensive sociohydrological framework. Although this Topic is not aimed to be a debate about sociohydrology, there is an embedded, overarching goal of contributing to its live definition and scope, and its relation to some of the existing themes of integrated water resource management and water-energy-food nexus.
For this Research Topic, we are calling for contributions on:
• Data-based analysis and/or modeling of human interactions with hydrology and water resource systems, with emphasis on feedbacks, two-way interactions, and coevolution;
• Demand- and societal need-driven water resource systems and its evolving interaction with resource (e.g. water, food, energy) security and governance;
• Analysis and modeling of the feedback loops between water resources availability, change, demand, and policy, and the resulting intuitive and counter-intuitive evolving phenomena such as timing and magnitude of rebound of water demand;
• Modeling virtual water trade in the form of food and energy, its drivers and motivation, and with emphasis on its two-way interaction with local hydrology and water resource systems and the sustainability of water resource use;
• Assessing human behavior uncertainty in integrated water resources governance and infrastructure planning and management; and
• New techniques and/or innovative use of existing techniques to model sociohydrological systems and interactions, including system dynamics, agent-based modeling, input-output tables.
THEME 4:
Innovative sensing, observing, measuring and analysing human-water data
Sociohydrology aims to provide crucial insights for understanding the mutual shaping mechanisms of human-water systems that govern co-evolutionary dynamics of water, land and urban processes. While it is well known that human activities, behaviors and decisions play an impacting role on the water cycle, the coupling and inter-linkages of human-water systems are rarely considered in water resource and disaster risk management. Sociohydrology aims to fill this crucial knowledge gap fostering trans-disciplinary studies promoting the development of novel human-water data collection and processing methods, numerical algorithms and participatory approaches for better understanding and management of natural resources.
Recent advances in hardware (e.g. mobile devices, low cost sensors, IoT, etc.) and software (e.g. geospatial tools; statistical analytics, artificial intelligence, etc.) technologies, along with the increased capabilities of remote sensing (e.g. satellites, drones, webcams etc.), provide unique opportunities to gather, process and share observations of natural and urban ecosystems.
Citizens are also more and more aware and concerned about climate and environmental issues. Voluntary community efforts are being increasingly developed around the world in order to advance science-driven participatory actions tackling water challenges. These initiative, which often benefit from large participation amongst stakeholders and the general public, offer new opportunities for observing freshwater systems. Crowdsourced data and citizen science provide a further stimulus and opportunity for natural and social sciences to join efforts and develop shared methods and procedures for observing, monitoring and simulating earth and anthropogenic dynamics.
Understanding coupled human water system also requires observations of human choices and behavior either in control settings such in human behaviour labs, living labs or in more randomized control trials settings. Adoption of innovative technologies remain a challenge, which requires understanding of human psychology and behavior based on social surveys inspired by diverse behavioural theories.
This Research Topic seeks to promote and publish research investigating human-water ecosystem interactions by means of innovative sensing technologies, observational data analytics and information management tools. We particularly envisage submissions that illustrate scientific and professional advancements (including best practices, case studies) based on state of the art monitoring technology, computer science, social and behavioral sciences, citizen science and big data for sociohydrology research and projects. Trans-disciplinary research, merging efforts of natural and earth sciences, are particularly encouraged for promoting investigations aiming to better understand the impact of human activities and behaviors on water-human systems. The goal is to create a community combining diverse background, expertise, data, models, technologies and case studies of interest for sociohydrology and related disciplines.
This Research Topic welcomes all kind of contributions that aim to better understand, observe, monitor and simulate human-water systems, but we especially encourage submissions on the following topics:
- Novel concepts and assessment frameworks for understanding and quantifying the interlinkages and feedbacks between human and water systems
- New human-water datasets, algorithms and analytical tools
- Opportunistic sensing, citizen science and crowdsourcing as innovative non-traditional means to monitor human and water system features, phenomena and behaviors
- New sensor technologies and monitoring approaches, including earth observation, that advance understanding of water availability and use at different scales.
- Data mining and processing for analyzing human and water systems including trans-disciplinary natural and social science surveying data, tools and procedures (e.g. social surveys, sociohydrological observatories etc.)
Human behavior experiments, social surveys, living labs experiences, Randomized Control Trials
THEME 5:
Solutions to Water Crises (Related to Actual Interventions)
“Pluralistic water research” integrates the hydrological and the social to provide sustainable solutions to water crises. While relying upon robust quantitative modelling, sociohydrology captures crises across many waters (surface, ground and interstitial) along quantity and quality dimensions, hydrosocial unfurls power hierarchies in access to safe and required quota of water, be it for drinking or irrigation purposes. The success of engineering solutions laying out “hard” interventions such as solar powered irrigation, dams, high yielding crop varieties, water treatment plants and water distributions and purifications depend on “soft” socio-political, cultural and psychological variables like the political landscape, community behaviours and governance arrangements.
How these soft parameters limit or advance the effect of hard interventions await more enhanced modelling and place-based qualitative analyses to disentangle various cause-effect pathways. While historical and process-based sociohydrology accommodates detailed temporal datasets and causal relationships across human-water systems, the hydrosocial paradigm reconciles “non-modern”, anti-hegemonic, water techniques and knowledge systems, animating local agencies within specific hydroscapes. This issue is dedicated to capture real time innovations through which water challenges have been confronted. It intends to unravel “storylines” along actionable water projects, reflecting on mediations across multiple actors and networks in specific spatio-temporal and cultural contexts, finally drawing our attention to the correlation between projected promises and actual realities. Situated at the crossroads of “boundary work”, we invite articles that will deploy a range of interdisciplinary frameworks like RANAS (Risk, Attitude, Norms, Ability, and Self-regulation), APIE (Awareness, Participation, Involvement and Engagement), HUPE (Historical Urban Political Ecology), etc. to demonstrate coupled sociohydrological and hydrosocial realties and in turn getting informed by empirical insights emanating from these actual water interventions. The final aim of the special issue is not to showcase water just actual interventions but to elicit a rigorous mapping of sustainable processes facilitating collective co-production of resilient water trajectories.
We invite technical experts, modelers, hydrosocial researchers and social scientists in general to suggest and showcase spatially-informed, historically-contingent, tested and appropriate water technologies and projects addressing particular sets of water crises. The research agenda is to explore both challenges and potentials in large-scale water projects involving transdisciplinary and trans-sectoral nodes of axis to finally learn from complex and sustainable processes and forge effective co-practices towards just and resilient water futures.
Cross-fertilizing sociohydrology with the hydrosocial and other frames of analyses, this Research Topic is motivated to showcase actual interventions addressing context specific water crises to learn from and critique ways through which intended and unintended consequences are generated across interplay of diverse technical and social variables along particular historical-geographies and cultures.
Some research questions/areas will include (but not restricted to) the following:
• Challenges and potentials embedded in needs-driven, field-adapted water technologies and social innovation; “infrastructural archipelagos” to address water challenges like WASH, etc.
• Innovative empirical techniques to disentangle cause and effects in adoption and use of water technologies
• Spatio-temporal, geospatial analysis revealing hotspots, uneven geographies of water, etc.
• Lessons from coproduction of water technologies involving multiple actors within specific geographical and cultural contexts
• Integration of biophysical model with participatory approaches to adapt to water challenges in specific hydroscapes