UGA Logo

UGA Environmental
Informatics and Control Program




About Us

Research Programs
Areas of Interest
Current Projects



>Environmental Foresight and Forecasting Environmental Change
>
Adaptive Community Learning
>
Watershed Management
>
Quality Assurance of Models
>
Analysis of Uncertainty, Structural Error, and Reachable Futures
>
Reconciling Models with Data (System Identification
>
Attainability and Inclination in the Behavior of Environmental Systems
>
Monitoring the Environment in Real Time
>Control of Microbial Ecosystems
>Infrastructure Vulnerability and High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC)

>Sustainability in the Water Sector (Spotting "Hot Technologies" for
Sustainable Cities)

>Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental Goods)
>Read or Print all Projects


Laboratory

Publications

Quick Overview
     
 Site Map   |   Feedback   |   Contacts   |   Home
 Research Program

Current Projects Read or Print all Projects

Watershed Management. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), not to mention integrated land-water management, is seen by many as the means by which to move away from unsustainability in the water sector. Point sources of pollution, we are told, are no longer the problem. Nonpoint sources are. And they, often largely in association with stormwater runoff, are the causes by which nutrients, sediments, and pathogens have become ranked as national priorities in terms of the types of waterbody impairments. These are issues of widespread concern, as much in the Oconee and Chattahoochee watersheds of Georgia, as anywhere else. In collaboration with environmental economists at Georgia State University, we are investigating offset-banking as a mechanism for pollutant trading in a watershed, amongst urban point sources and rural nonpoint sources. For this we need to know in more detail than previously (and in different ways) the costs of building and operating point-source wastewater treatment facilities and, in particular, the scope for minimizing the costs of adapting existing infrastructure to meet upgraded performance requirements. In the laboratory world of the computer, we can imagine exploring watershed pollutant trading, under uncertainty, and in watersheds vulnerable to transient pollution events. It will require a model reflecting a balanced view of the inter-play between urban and rural segments of the watershed; neither an urban model treating the rural segment as mere boundary conditions, nor a whole watershed model reducing the urban segment to some disembodied, singular point source. It will require a model embracing the notion of an urban wastewater infrastructure that is not for ever in a state of invariant equilibrium. These are our current goals. When the time is right for progress in practice, we shall seek to embed this research within the framework of adaptive community learning.