Resilience assessments provide critical insights into how societies and ecosystems drive, withstand and adapt to hydrological change. Although freshwater is embedded within social and ecological systems, freshwater resilience is still predominantly studied within disciplinary silos or within pairwise human-water and ecosystem-water frameworks. It is imperative to build on and integrate these disciplinary foundations to develop more comprehensive theories of system change, characterize systemic risks, and identify opportunities for improved governance and management.
This session invites interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions that investigate or support freshwater resilience assessments through the integrated representation of hydrological, social, and ecological processes. Examples of contributions that we hope to receive include, but are not limited to:
[•] Analysis of empirical Earth observations, such as remote sensing, or field-collected social and ecological data to evaluate and track resilience across catchments, regions, and global freshwater systems.
[•] Development or use of process-based models to assess interactions and feedbacks between hydrological, ecological, and societal dynamics.
[•] Applications of machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques to detect, model, and forecast freshwater resilience.
[•] Transdisciplinary case studies that work with practitioners, communities, or policy-makers to define system boundaries, support knowledge co-production, or advance frameworks that strengthen freshwater resilience in practice.
[•] Any other studies that work to build a more holistic and actionable understanding of freshwater resilience with insights that may inform strategies to safeguard freshwater’s role in sustaining ecosystems, societies, and Earth systems.
By bringing together researchers across hydrology, ecology, climate science, governance, and social-ecological systems research, this session is motivated to bridge methods and perspectives that are often fragmented and would benefit from greater integration and collaboration.