Sociohydrology, ecohydrology, and the space-time dynamics of human-altered catchments

ABSTRACT

A variety of interdisciplinary fields have provided distinct and complementary perspectives on human-water systems over the past few decades. In that context, an important distinctive feature of sociohydrology is its historical and methodological link to ecohydrology. This linkage implies a compatibility between the two fields that can be leveraged to address important modeling challenges in both fields. Sociohydrology has thus far focused on temporal dynamics and can benefit from recent advances in ecohydrology to represent spatial dynamics in coupled human-water systems. Conversely, as it increasingly focuses on human-altered catchments, ecohydrology can benefit from sociohydrology in terms of developing models of human behavior that are compatible with (eco)hydrological models, while being consistent with prevailing social science theories. We review recent work in ecohydrology and sociohydrology that substantiates these two arguments, and discuss the modeling of water-borne diseases as an example of a promising avenue of research that connects the two fields.

KEYWORDS:

• space-time dynamics
• ecohydrology
• models of human decision
• economics
• sociohydrology
• epidemiology

Editor S. Archfield Guest Editor S. Pande

Editor S. Archfield Guest Editor S. Pande

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Drs. Michèle Muller-Itten, David Yu, and Murugesu Sivapalan for their helpful feedback on specific components of this paper. We thank Drs. Kaveh Madani and Majid Shafiee-Jood for providing us with the data presented in Fig. 1. We also thank the Guest Editor Saket Pande for the invitation to write this paper, and three reviewers for their helpful feedback. Funding from the National Science Foundation Coupled Natural Systems Human (CNH) program award ICER 1824951 (to MFM) and from the Environmental Change Initiative at the University of Notre Dame (to LB) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [ICER 1824951]; University of Notre Dame [Environmental Change Initiative internal grant].