Let’s start thinking about water!

Land use/land cover change classification and measurement in the Middle Rio Grande Region, USA-Mexico using remote sensing and geographic information systems

Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park, Texas. Photo credit: Daniel Schwen, Wikimedia

Humans have altered—and continue to alter—the landscape in response to population growth, the needs of society, and water resources. In this study, the authors look at the middle part of the Rio Grande Basin, from San Antonio, New Mexico (home of the Owl Bar & Cafe!), to the confluence of the Rio Conchos with the Rio Grande, just upstream of Presidio, Texas and Ojinaga, Chihuahua. Using LandSat data, Belhaj and partners quantified land-use change between 1994 and 2015. Broadly (and not unexpectedly), they showed that native land cover had declined due to urbanization.

Urban area increased from 1.6% of the total study area in 1994 to more than 2.9% in 2015, nearly an 83%increase (the authors report this as a 45% percent increase, but that ain’t right). The abstract conflicts with itself in mentioning “agriculture expansion” in one sentence and “decrease in agricultural land cover” in another. Overall, they report a 12% decrease in agricultural land use. Water area decreased 56% (have you seen Elephant Butte Reservoir recently?), and forest area decreased 31% (due to fires). Shrubland constitutes much of the basin at roughly 90% of the overall area. There’s an error in their table of land-area results where an extra 300 square kilometers appears in their analysis for 2015 (each row should add to the same number; 2015 does not). The statistics in the paper conform with that error, so buyer beware.

An exploration of groundwater resource ecosystem service sustainability: A system dynamics case study in Texas

Pitched as “groundwater resource ecosystem service sustainability,” this paper is really about using a systems approach to address groundwater sustainability with ecosystems as a side hustle. The authors develop a systems approach for groundwater and apply it to the entirety of Texas as a case study. As part of their systems analysis, they identify feedback loops to explain why groundwater users continue to use groundwater even after realizing that they are not using it sustainably. The systems analysis and the example of how it could be applied is the value of this paper, but be wary of the application and its outputs because of the overgeneralization of groundwater in Texas and a number of incorrect assumptions (which is why I am not reporting results here). Regardless, it’s an impressive effort of three undergrads working with a professor on this project. That probably explains why, instead of citing my report on groundwater sustainability in Texas, the authors instead cite a press release by the Environmental Defense Fund about the report. Did I unknowingly cut off Dr. Turner on I-37? (If I did, I’m sorry, dude!) More likely, the students stopped when they got what they needed rather than accurately citing the actual source.

Texas Water Observatory—A distributed network for monitoring water, energy, and carbon cycles under variable climate and land use on Gulf Coast Plains

This mucho-authored paper is about the Texas Water Observatory. The Observatory uses over 300 monitoring stations to observe the Brazos River Corridor’s water, energy, and carbon cycles at different spatial and time scales. The Observatory is intended to be a resource to better understand and manage agriculture, waters, ecosystems, biodiversity, disasters, health, energy, and weather. It is also where scientists can observe the results of land use and climate change.

The paper describes the site design, instrument specs, data collection, and quality control. The authors also present some results and compare them to other data. This is a Texas A&M University effort, so I expect that data access requires a small cut to the thumb to make sure your blood is maroon; however, their website (https://two.tamu.edu) provides limited data access with the promise of more to come.