Pricing drinking water testing in northern Haiti: Financial sensitivity to operating costs, user demand, and economic conditions.

Safe drinking water availability is a concern in Haiti. Public systems have limited coverage and reliability. Private wells and local water sources are often of unknown or poor quality.

A Participatory Approach for Balancing Accuracy and Complexity in Modeling Resilience and Robustness.

Robustness and resilience are widely used in the biological sciences and related disciplines to describe how systems respond to change. Robustness is the ability to tolerate change without adapting or moving to another state. Resilience refers to the ability for a system to sustain a perturbation and maintain critical functions.

Analysis of community-level factors contributing to cholera infection and water testing access in the Northern Corridor of Haiti.

Vibrio cholera, the bacteria that cause cholera, is endemic in Haiti with a presence in both cities and remote areas. Improved access to drinking water testing and treatment in remote areas may reduce the impact of the disease. This case study uses correlation and regression analysis to identify the main factors that hinder access to water testing and that lead to high cholera infection rates among communities in the Northern Corridor of Haiti.

Forest restoration as a strategy to mitigate climate impacts on wildfire, vegetation, and water in semiarid forests.

Climate change and wildfire are interacting to drive vegetation change and potentially reduce water quantity and quality in the southwestern United States, Forest restoration is a management approach that could mitigate some of these negative outcomes. However, little information exists on how restoration combined with climate change might influence hydrology across large forest landscapes that incorporate multiple vegetation types and complex fire regimes. We combined spatially explicit vegetation and fire modeling with statistical water and sediment yield models for a large forested landscape (335,000 ha) on the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona, USA.

Effects of climate variability and accelerated forest thinning on watershed-scale runoff in southwestern USA ponderosa pine forests.

The recent mortality of up to 20% of forests and woodlands in the southwestern United States, along with declining stream flows and projected future water shortages, heightens the need to understand how management practices can enhance forest resilience and functioning under unprecedented scales of drought and wildfire. To address this challenge, a combination of mechanical thinning and fire treatments are planned for 238,000 hectares (588,000 acres) of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests across central Arizona, USA. Mechanical thinning can increase runoff at fine scales, as well as reduce fire risk and tree water stress during drought, but the effects of this practice have not been studied at scales commensurate with recent forest disturbances or under a highly variable climate.

Semi-arid aquifer responses to forest restoration treatments and climate change.

The purpose of this study was to develop an interpretive groundwater-flow model to assess the impacts that planned forest restoration treatments and anticipated climate change will have on large regional, deep (>400 m), semi-arid aquifers. Simulations were conducted to examine how tree basal area reductions impact groundwater recharge from historic conditions to 2099. Novel spatial analyses were conducted to determine areas and rates of potential increases in groundwater recharge.

Evaluating ecohydrological theories of woody root distribution in the Kalahari.

The contribution of savannas to global carbon storage is poorly understood, in part due to lack of knowledge of the amount of belowground biomass. In these ecosystems, the coexistence of woody and herbaceous life forms is often explained on the basis of belowground interactions among roots. However, the distribution of root biomass in savannas has seldom been investigated, and the dependence of root biomass on rainfall regime remains unclear, particularly for woody plants.