HYDROLOGY OUTREACH TO TRIBAL YOUTH: INSIGHTS FROM COLD REGION HYDROLOGY WORKSHOP

With teetering fluctuations of climate conditions happening on global to local scales, it is essential for communities to be able to translate environmental conditions and patterns for managing water resources. This is particularly evident for tribal communities where there is a lack of technical capacity for capturing data. Tribal communities are often the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, thus the absence of research is why outreach to tribal youth is key for their recognition of how hydroclimatic processes impacts states of drought and deluge for addressing and leveraging issues of water security. During academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24, a total of 4 workshops were done with White Shield High School (WSHS) Youth as a local community of a cold region in North Dakota. These workshops have shown promising benefits with youth being able to engage in data collection and interpretation through cold region hydrological modeling. The workshop offers a peer-based learning approach to recognize the concept of Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) and how to feed collected data to a Cold Region Hydrological Model (CRHM) to decipher overall SWE significance within the local landscape. Over half of students that participated in latest workshop said that were very likely or likely to have learned at least one new tool/concept and that they felt STEM activities such as this outreach gave good insight to further their awareness of how important SWE is when determining hydrological patterns on the landscape. On the other end, when it came to the more technical work of interpretation of CRHM results, students displayed low interest. Overall, there was an increase in participation from 22 to 31 participants with students being highly receptive to hands-on activity. This workshop leaves potential for broader community discussion by allowing youth to be stimulated by scientific components that they could carry forward in respect to the transfer of knowledge that may even be linked to preserving Traditional Ecological Knowledge in addition to being a holistic approach to understanding the effects of climate change at a localized scale. This mutual benefit of building on workshops such as these could lead to strengthening the relationship between tribal communities, institutions and the environment that can also contribute to data compilation for water policies and decision-making processes.