BALANCING ECOLOGICAL AND HUMAN WATER DEMANDS IN ARID REGIONS: LESSONS FROM THE ATACAMA DESERT OF NORTHERN CHILE

Development of water resources of any arid nation, whether developed or developing, tends to follow a fairly uniform sequence beginning with water for subsistence human survival, followed by water projects for resource extraction (either agricultural or mineral) and finally, if financial resources are available, a redistribution of water resources to sources not originally considered during the resource extraction phase, such as in-stream flows, ecosystem restoration or ecotourism.

In many arid regions, the quantification of available water resources is often made difficult by the highly temporal nature of precipitation and river flows, along with the difficulty in accurately predicting the magnitude of ground water resources and their ultimate outflows. Collaborative research conducted by NSF REU students and their Chilean counterparts is focused on developing a more comprehensive understanding of ground-water discharge in wetlands in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and it’s relative magnitude in comparison to other water demands including ecotourism, mining and subsistence agriculture.