Watershed Symposium 2024

As Utah faces water scarcity, reevaluating water allocations to reflect the highest social value is crucial. By integrating social values into aquifer storage and recovery projects, communities can boost water's contribution to well-being, ensuring security, resilience, and equitable access for future generations.

Full Abstract:
Water resource management regimes allocate water across different users and, at least implicitly, across time. The traditional focus has been on satisfying the demands of municipal, residential, agricultural, and commercial uses. Increasingly, demands for water in Utah to support ecological functioning have been recognized. However, as communities grapple with the challenges of water scarcity, there is a growing recognition for the need to assess whether current allocations reflect highest and best use of water now and into the future. What is needed are allocations that get the most social value for each acre-foot buck. This requires determining a “social value of water” in each of its uses, including use now versus use in the future and in different circumstances — for example, in good and bad years for precipitation. This presentation explores the concept of assessing social values of water in the context of aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) projects. We show that by properly accounting for social values across all situations, the total contribution of water to social wellbeing in communities can go up, even as the physical amount of water is unchanged. Current approaches may be severely missing that mark. The presentation will highlight the importance of understanding and quantifying the broader economic and social dimensions ASR projects and other management actions and their potential to enhance water security, community resilience, equitable access, and economic activity for present and future generations.

The poster session is a forum for presenters to highlight programs and to share successful ideas with colleagues by presenting a research study, a practical problem-solving effort, an innovative program, and more.

Posters are listed alphabetically by title. ==> See Full Abstracts

Establishing a Functional Flows Framework for the Great Salt Lake Basin
Farah Nusrat, Utah State University
Functional flows are components of flow regimes that sustain river, wetland, and the Great Salt Lake (GSL) ecosystems, including hydrological, ecological, geomorphic, and biogeochemical processes. Natural resource managers can utilize this framework to design strategies for increasing resilience of GSL Basin waterbodies to climate change.

Great Salt Lake Playa Dust Suppression via Artificial Surface Crusting
Zachary Claerhout, University of Utah / Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Kevin Perry, Department of Atmospheric Sciences / University of Utah
Dust from the exposed portions of the Great Salt Lake (GSL) lakebed poses a potential health risk that may need to be mitigated if the lake level remains low. This study investigates the efficacy of artificial surface crusting via surface soil saturation as a potential dust suppression mechanism on the GSL playa.

Novel Rapid Lead and Copper Detection Method in Drinking Water
Nick Halverson, e-sens
This abstract presents new viable alternative lead and copper methods for reliable and portable testing applications that would allow much greater access for water and wastewater testers.

Rio Tinto Reduce Reclaim Remediate
Kiani Ellingson, Rio Tinto
Julie LeFevre, Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto Kennecott is committed to environmental water stewardship. From the metering and measuring of everyday water use, the preservation of the Inland Sea Shorebird Reserve, and our donation of water to the Great Salt Lake, these efforts benefit Utah, the community where we operate.