IRES: Empowering students to be interdisciplinary and community-minded water scientists in Andean Peru

Through this IRES project, diverse cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students from Rutgers University - Newark, Arizona State University, Cal Poly Humboldt, and University of Hawai’i Hilo gain research experience as interdisciplinary and community-based water scientists. Students conduct research advised by PIs and in collaboration with Peruvian professors, students, and community members. The research focus is on water resources in the source watersheds of two communities of less than 4,000 inhabitants. Working with these communities, the researchers use a variety of field-based techniques to determine how landscape features regulate the flow of water to sustain streamflow vital to municipal and agricultural needs. The collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural team empowers students to be future environmental leaders and co-produce knowledge to guide local and regional sustainable management of the Andean Water Tower. The Vilcanota Urubamba Basin (VUB, ~ 11,000 km2) is a seasonally dry landscape in the Cusco highlands of Perú. Of the more than one million people living in the VUB, the vast majority depend directly on the water tower of puna grasslands for food and water security, hydropower, and cultural practices. Cusco, home to nearly half of the basin’s population, derives 90 % of its municipal water from two puna-dominated sources. In isolated upland catchments peat-forming wetlands, known as bofedales, play a critical role in regulating water to sustain baseflow and may be key landscape features to achieving regional water security. However, the current and future water regulation capacity of puna is poorly constrained. To address current and future knowledge gaps, this project quantifies the hydrologic role of bofedales in two watersheds within the VUB that are representative of Cusco’s primary water sources as well as vital to the immediate downstream communities of Zurite and Phinaya. The research project has three primary objectives. First, to train and empower three diverse cohorts of undergraduate and graduate students in community-based and interdisciplinary water resources research focused in Zurite and/or Phinaya. Second, to collaborate with Peruvian knowledge experts and use hydrogeophysical techniques to quantify bofedal water storage in the communities’ source watersheds. Third, to collaborate with the two communities to co-produce knowledge to guide local and regional conservation to achieve water security. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.