Nooksack Tribe Air Temperature Data

Data Paper Title: Mountain water budget modeling with improved high elevation spatially distributed daily temperature lapse rates

The Nooksack Indian Tribe Water Resources Program has an established history of advancing science while supporting local students and researchers in their investigations of the Nooksack River. By working with the University of Washington, Western Washington University and project collaborators from the Sauk-Suiattle, Swinomish, and Stillaguamish tribes, we have extended realistic water management challenges to educational institutions in order to explore our shared gaps in knowledge about physical and human impacted watershed processes. To further develop these academic and professional relationships, we propose capacity building of Nooksack Indian Tribe Natural Resources Department staff through a professional training program tailored to skillbuilding in computer code development, programming, and data analysis with the support of the University of Washington Freshwater Initiative, (see freshwater.uw.edu). The following task description is for work specific to this contract:

Task 1 – Climate Technology Transfer with training on DHSVM and data publication:

Design and implement a pilot formal training program that pairs a UW research advisor and hydrology or related data science student, with a Nooksack tribal scientist, using open source tools that make available data and existing models more accessible to the Nooksack Tribe. The curriculum will follow the UW eScience supported workshops on Geospatial Data Science (Geohackweek https://geohackweek.github.io/) and extend curriculum as needed to train tribal scientists and technicians from their current skill level, over the course of a year, to become fluent on the basics of open source programming tools and National Science Foundation funded data repositories and modeling toolkits (e.g., Python, Github, Jupyter Notebooks, CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System and HydroClient, HydroShare, and Landlab).

Project work and data-driven curriculum will be interactively customized to questions of interest in the Nooksack River watershed as determined by the Natural Resources Department. Our goal for the training program is to develop the capacity for the Natural Resources Department to utilize established modeling protocol to address research questions related to the management of Nooksack Indian Tribe treaty resources. In addition we will facilitate and support ongoing relationships between tribal scientists and academic researchers, and to build tribal capacity in data analysis, usability, and reproducibility for research products generated by tribal scientists. The collaboration with UW and other Northwest Tribes will hopefully serve as a model for collaborations elsewhere with marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by environmental change, and provide educational partnerships that benefit both academic institutions and tribes. We will support the Natural Resources Department scientist in presenting the outcomes of the training with model stakeholders: 1) WRIA 1 researchers and government scientists, 2) Northwest Indian College students, and 3) UW and WWU students with hands on workshop style presentations.

Research products:

1. Pilot project data set published with meta data on Hydroshare and a peer reviewed data paper
2. Pilot project curriculum made available to model stakeholders. Contract amount:

Assumptions:

One month senior research scientist (Christina Bandaragoda) time on curriculum and publication and data management; 0.5 months research scientist (Nicoleta Cristea) to support 10 days of in person work sessions with Nooksack Indian Tribe Natural Resources Department scientist.

Contract Timeframe:

Start date November 1, 2018

End date Dec 30, 2019