URBAN WATER AS AN INTEGRATIVE THEME FOR GRADUATE ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

The “water crisis” is emerging as a critical issue in the U.S. and the world for the 21st century. Contributing to this crisis is the continued expansion of the urban footprint, which concentrates stresses on water supply and water quality in metropolitan regions. To address this problem, leaders of the future will require skills that link the social sciences, engineering, and natural sciences. Under sponsorship of the NSF Integrative Graduate Education Training and Research Program (IGERT) and in collaboration with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, we aim to provide this kind of training at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), with a focus on Water in the Urban Environment as a unifying theme using the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area as a laboratory in which to conduct our program.

Complex relationships between human and natural systems in urban settings offer a new frontier for environmental research. There is a need for training students who understand the relationship between the natural environment, the built environment, and the feedback between policy and environmental consequences. Rather than treating urban water exclusively from any single disciplinary perspective, we have formed an integrative program that investigates the complex interactions of water in urbanized areas. Our program comprises three broad areas of study encompassing these interactions that our IGERT Fellows are being trained to address: (1) Urban Hydrology and Contaminant Transport, (2) Urban Biogeochemical Cycles, Aquatic Ecosystems and Human Health, and (3) Urban Water Policy, Management, and Institutions.

We are offering new integrative courses in Water in the Urban Environment, Research Methods for the Urban Environment, Modeling the Urban Environment, and Spatial Statistics for the Urban Environment, which bring together students from eight Ph.D. degree programs to gain an appreciation of the varied disciplinary viewpoints, terminology, and data sets required to address urban environmental problems. Finally, in recognition that Ph.D. students often will be electing careers other than academic ones, we are providing exposure to diverse career choices though a required off-campus internship, including science at agencies, policy, management, teaching, and community outreach.