Originally published in our October 2022 newsletter (Issue 17)
Dr. Hadjimichael uses MSD methods to investigate how water allocation might interact with and be affected by hydroclimatic, social, infrastructural, and institutional changes in the Upper Colorado River Basin within the state of Colorado. In the Integrated Multisector Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project, she is currently exploring how dynamic water demand adaptation might act to dampen the impacts of some of these stressors.
NAntonia Hadjimichael is an interdisciplinary scientist working at Penn State University as an Assistant Professor. Antonia’s research focuses on understanding the dynamic relationships between human and natural systems, with a particular emphasis on climate impacts on water and their implications for human use. Her work contributes to literature on decision making under deep uncertainty, model diagnostics, water resources management, and multisector dynamics. Outside her research, she is a member of the MultiSector Dynamics Community of Practice Facilitation Team, Chair of Communications for the Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty and serves on Penn State’s Water Council.
Socio-environmental systems face rapid and profound transitions induced by human and natural changes. Water resources systems specifically are confronted with evolving and deeply uncertain stressors driven by climate, resource limitations and societal demands which necessitate the use of diverse exploratory modeling methods and advanced diagnostics to inform the identification of sustainable adaptive pathways. Antonia’s work in this area has focused on the advancement and application of bottom-up approaches to vulnerability and resilience assessment for water resources systems. These frameworks employ exploratory modeling to simulate large ensembles of plausible future scenarios and thereupon identify those with consequential effects on the system. Paired with high-performance computing, and data and visual analytics, Antonia’s work clarifies tradeoffs between system goals, and identifies dominant stressors for sectors and stakeholders.
Working with collaborators, Antonia has applied these methods to investigate how water allocation might interact with and be affected by hydroclimatic, social, infrastructural, and institutional changes in the Upper Colorado River Basin within the state of Colorado (UCRB) [1]. This is a system with a strong presence of social institutions, dictating water allocation based on prior appropriation. Consequently, these institutions also determine how vulnerabilities are distributed among stakeholders, as senior-right holders always get their full entitlement before any junior right holders. By coupling the State’s own water supply and allocation model with this exploratory approach, the team examined how hundreds of users in the UCRB might be affected. Their results demonstrated the strong effect of human institutions in shaping user vulnerabilities as, under the same ensemble of scenarios, stakeholders may experience vastly different impacts to their water supply. Using sensitivity analysis methods and visual analytics, they also showed that the drivers and uncertainties controlling these impacts also differ across users [2].
Continuing this work under the Integrated Multisector Multiscale Modeling (IM3) project, she is currently exploring how dynamic water demand adaptation might act to dampen the impacts of some of these stressors. Given the complexity of this system and the scale of this experiment, Antonia has been working with collaborators Patrick Reed (Cornell University), and Chris Vernon and Travis Thurber (PNNL) to innovate on how such large exploratory experiments can be performed to remain tractable and reproducible. Outside IM3, Antonia is also leading the MultiSector Dynamics area under the COMPASS-GLM project. Working with Jim Yoon, Jill Deines (PNNL), Laura Johnson (Heidelberg University) and others, they aim to better understand interactions between agricultural practices and natural systems in the Great Lakes. To do so, they are developing an agricultural agent-based model to capture uncertainties and feedbacks between human actions and the watershed they operate in.
Highlighted Articles:
A. Hadjimichael et al., “Defining Robustness, Vulnerabilities, and Consequential Scenarios for Diverse Stakeholder Interests in Institutionally Complex River Basins,” Earths Future, vol. 8, no. 7, p. e2020EF001503, 2020, doi: 10.1029/2020EF001503.
A. Hadjimichael, J. Quinn, and P. Reed, “Advancing Diagnostic Model Evaluation to Better Understand Water Shortage Mechanisms in Institutionally Complex River Basins,” Water Resour. Res., vol. 56, no. 10, p. e2020WR028079, 2020, doi: 10.1029/2020WR028079.
Website: hadjimichael.info
Twitter:@a_hadjimichael