Community Resilience and Wellbeing

My research in this area examines the intersection of people and the natural environment to understand the relationship between people and ecological outcomes, as well as how water and environmental management approaches/decisions affect people over time. Ongoing projects related to this topic include:

Delta Residents Survey: The Delta Residents Survey (DRS) aims to monitor social health of the estuary, including how people influence ecological outcomes of interest and understand how to support residents better to in turn improve management approaches/decisions that affect the estuary over time. The first DRS was mailed in 2023 to a random sample of 82,000 households across three Delta zones, yielding over 2,300 responses (2.9% response rate). The survey was designed to study multiple social scientific gaps identified in the 2022–2026 Delat Science Action Agenda and the 2019 Delta Plan 5-Year Review. The survey included 43 questions across five themes: sense of place, regional priorities and quality of life, environmental and climate change experiences, civic engagement and governance, and demographics. The study was conducted by a multi-university research team led by CA Sea Grant and funded by the Delta Stewardship Council’s (DSC) Delta Science Program, with extensive community engagement to inform survey design and interpretation. The second DRS is planned to be released in Spring 2027. The goals of this survey are to determine key social indicators to repeatedly measure, update and refine 2023 DRS questions to measure key indicators, and to use this process to develop a plan for long-term social monitoring. Check out the DRS website for more information.

Risk Assessment of Delta-reliant Community Water Systems: Surface water in California has been reorgranized to create interdepencies between the Delta and over 400 community water systems, serving about 27 million people, by delivering Delta water exports for drinking water. The extent to which these populations reliant on Delta water varies widely region, supplier, and user. This research project builds on a newly released, statewide dataset on surface water sources, sales, and transfers. This work will take a data synthesis approach to understand vulernability and distribution of risk to water security over time in these community water systems by examining the SAFER datasets and the new Vulnerable Communities Platform dataset. Stay tuned more info on this soon!