Immersive Modeling of Water Banking Elicits Local Knowledge to Get More Water to Great Salt Lake

Water banking supports decentralized water management and facilitates flexible allocation of scarce water. The local context is crucial for transactions to occur and often overlooked in top-down management. Here we present an interactive, immersive online model of a water bank. The aim is to involve stakeholders in eliciting and improve key hydrologic, species interaction, social inclusion, and other assumptions and factors that promote or limit implementation of a water bank. Users choose to represent canal companies, cities, or environmental water users. Stakeholders adjust their strategies to withdraw, consume, conserve, and bank water in response to assumptions about water availability and prior choices. For example, agricultural water users select the crop and acreage. Price is negotiated between the water bank and users. At the end of an interactive, immersive model session, we ask participants why they made particular choices, what they liked, and how to improve the model and assumptions.