Water in the western United States is disappearing, and several states are facing severe water shortages as drought conditions worsen. Many streams are drying up, and there is growing concern that this trend will only continue as climate change produces warmer and drier conditions. The loss of stream ecosystems has far reaching ecological, social, and economic implications. Species that depend on these ecosystems for habitat will be at greater risk of extinction and humans will lose vital sources of water relied upon for agriculture, drinking water, and recreation.
This project aimed to identify how water availability is changing in the West, focusing specifically on when and where streams go dry. Researchers sought to examine thousands of records of stream temperature to see how temperature influences patterns of stream drying, and then map locations of drying streams across the West—essentially putting stream drying on the map.
The results of this work are expected to provide water resource managers with a new method for identifying water loss due to stream drying. This new method, in combination with maps of stream drying, is designed to enable managers to make more informed decisions about how to best manage water resources and to devise improved means for monitoring our water supply in the face of increasing scarcity.
