Assessing the State of Water Resource Knowledge and Tools for Future Planning in the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo Basin

This project inventories and reviews available water resource models used to meet multiple (and often competing) water resource management objectives. Water resource modeling tools have been developed for many different regions and sub-basins of the Rio Grande/Bravo (RGB). Each of these tools have specific objectives, whether it is to explore drought mitigation alternatives, conflict resolution, climate change evaluation, tradeoff and economic synergies, water allocation, reservoir operations, or collaborative planning. We specifically evaluate the applicability of those models to evaluating trade-offs in meeting societal and environmental flow requirements to recover native ecosystems. This work communicates the state of the RGB science to diverse stakeholders, researchers, and decision-makers. It also identify information gaps that merit additional research and resources, describe promising future steps to couple and improve existing systems models, and propose ideas to share and serve science syntheses in a digital and spatially-explicit databases. The products of this project represent a support tool for water resources management and planning frameworks in the basin.