Engineer Research and Development Center - Environmental Laboratory
Risk and Decision Science Team
Howard Hanson Collaboration Research
Equity Metrics for forecast informed reservoir operations. Changing established operations for USACE water infrastructure can disrupt a delicate balance between different parties reliant on the infrastructure for different purposes. This project aims to apply previous research about successful collaboration to enable operational changes to water infrastructure by surveying a steering committee for such a proposed change before the project begins. This way, elements such as trust can be evaluated as they are built over time, or fail to be built, and the relationships between the projects key collaborators can be examined for influence on the project’s outcome or successful operational change.
The previously conducted study on Lake Mendocino proposed several indicators of successful collaboration within a FIRO project. However, the study was conducted retrospectively, meaning that we could not study how metrics of success grew or changed over the course of the project.
This project will examine the identified collaboration metrics at the beginning of the Howard Hanson project with the goal to compare initial responses with a second survey to be completed at the project’s conclusion. This will support parsing which metrics of successful collaboration should exist at the beginning of the project, and which can be built over time within the project.
This work will support the FIRO projects by ensuring that they have the components of successful collaboration within their Steering Committee, or by ensuring that these metrics can be built over the course of the project. Successful collaboration in the Steering Committee is necessary to achieve the outcomes of FIRO and to access its benefits of more flexibility in reservoir management.