Integrated Hydrologic History of the American Southwest

Springs and wetlands in arid environments are bellwethers of aquifer health and water availability. These water-obligate ecosystems were dynamically sensitive to climatic fluctuations in the recent geologic past, especially to centennial- and decadal-scale warming events. Extreme events such as severe drought are projected to become more common throughout the Southwest in the coming years, resulting in water scarcity and unprecedented social and economic losses. This project builds upon and augments our previous research and will integrate hydrologic, stratigraphic, chronologic, geochemical, and paleoenvironmental data spanning the late Pleistocene to modern to document the responsiveness of water-dependent ecosystems to megadroughts throughout the southwestern U.S. We will combine fundamental framework observations and data with innovative analytical techniques and climate modeling to quantify critical temperature and precipitation thresholds of arid land ecosystems and advance our understanding of the range of potential outcomes to biomes and human activities in the event they are crossed in the wake of future drought.