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

The purpose of this immersive online collaborative is to give collaborators the opportunity to immerse in and personify water user roles for a water bank in Cache Valley, UT to explore water banking strategies to get more water to the declining Great Salt Lake (GSL). In a model session, each collaborator immerses in a water user role and articulate a strategy to consume and bank water for that user. There are five roles in the model, three agricultural users, one urban user, and the bank. The collaborators can adapt their strategy in response to their available water, others’ choices, and the real-time discussion of choices. Through the activity and the discussions that follow, we want to learn,
i. Why do people decide to consume, conserve, bank, and deliver water within the immersive modeling environments?
ii. Which new insights do participants take away from a model session?
iii. Which improvements do they suggest in modeling and in implementation?
iv. How can an immersive online collaborative modeling approach support the adoption of water banking including delivering water to GSL?
Till May 2025, 29 farmers, ranchers, practitioners, and experts participated in the acitivity.

Contents of this resource:
1) CacheValleyWaterBank.xlsx - Model file in Excel. Download, move into Google Drive, invite people to join, and follow the remaining instructions on the README file.
2) ImmersiveModelingWaterBankingGSL.docx – A 2 page summary of study containing background, key results and innovative
3) readme.md- A markdown document which contains background on the model, and instructions on how to guide an immersive modeling activity.

Folders
4) ModelFilesandNotes – Folder containing excel files for each model session, notes taken during each modeling session and a Result.xls file containing results summarized for this study.
5) FiguresCode – Folder containing the subfolders to replicate the results in the study and a docx file with instructions to replicate the figures in the study.
6) IRB - documents required to share with potential collaborators that are required by Utah State University's Institutional Review Board (IRB).