From May 2010 to March 2011, Reclamation conducted a pilot run of the Yuma Desalting Plant (YDP) and demonstrated its potential to augment lower Colorado River supplies. Over 30,000 acre-feet of irrigation return flow was recycled preserving a like amount of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, approximately the amount of water used by 116,000 people in a year.

Novelist John Updike is taking a dim view of leadership when he asks in his novel, Rabbit is Rich, “How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?” The Water Resources Research Center conference was organized with a far loftier idea of leadership, at least in the water and environmental field. Titled “Creating New Leadership for Arizona’s Water and Environment in a Time of Change,” the conference was premised on the belief that present and up-and-coming leaders share a commitment to ensure future wise management of the state’s water and environment. With due respect to Updike, the conference recognized that many graduating students, the bunch of kids who will be turning older, will be the emerging leaders in the water and the environmental field. This, however, is seen as a cause of optimism; the conference recognized their talents and offered an opportunity to advance their interests. A program lineup of seasoned professionals in the water and environmental field and promising rookies was part of the game plan for addressing conference issues. The conference raised some critical questions: What kinds of leaders are needed to navigate a future marked by change and uncertainty? What is the best way to foster these leaders? The meeting served as a forum for participants, both established professionals and emerging leaders, those who have long labored in the field and those getting started, to work together to answer the very challenging questions. This special edition of the Arizona Water Resource newsletter provides conference coverage, identifying major issues and noting some of the recommendations and findings from the different sessions. What is included is necessarily selective. Hopefully, however, the featured highlights will show that the conference was a vigorous and engaging event. Additional conference information is available at the WRRC web site: cals.arizona.edu/azwater.

The water resource field is among those areas expected to benefit from nanotechnology, its application holding special promise for treatment and remediation; sensing and detection; and pollution prevention. That cuts a rather wide swath in the water resources field. The nanorevolution or movement is being met with both optimism and caution as scientists ponder how best to take advantage of its benefits and at the same time understand and reckon with its possible risks.

Arizona has another Wild and Scenic River; Fossil Creek with it’s the travertine geological formations and crystal clear waters now shares the same protected designation as a segment of the middle Verde River, the state’s only other Wild and Scenic River. Approving Fossil Creek’s special designation was a detail in a massive piece of legislation, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act, a package of over 160 bills, that set aside more than 2 million acres of newly protected wilderness in nine states. More than 3.3 million acres of public lands in Arizona gained permanent protection. President Obama signed the law on March 30. Fossil Creek is an Arizona success story, an environmental rags-to-riches tale. Dammed early last century for power generation, Fossil Creek’s once quick-running water was a mere a trickle until the turn of this century. In 1999, Arizona Public Service shut down the power plants, and restoration efforts commenced. The dam was lowered and diversions ceased in June 2005, restoring full flows to the creek. This is the first Arizona watercourse to have a major water retention structure retired. In its heyday Fossil Creek was considered the fourth largest travertine system in the world. Fed by underground streams, it ran year-round almost 17 miles to the Verde River, its waters rich with calcium carbonate from the limestone aquifer below. Fossil Creek was one of 86 newly established Wild and Scenic Rivers with others located in California, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming. Efforts are underway to gain support for a Wild and Scenic listing of another Arizona River, the Blue River, a tributary to the San Francisco River. Rivers or segment of rivers are designated Wild and Scenic to protect special qualities including scenic, recreational, geologic, and fish and wildlife; they are not to be dammed or otherwise impeded to protect their free-flowing condition. The recently passed law also provides other water-related provisions benefitting the state. Funding was authorized to support the federal government’s role in a comprehensive effort to preserve wildlife habitat along the lower Colorado River. The bill also authorized the Secretary of the Interior to consider ways to supplement water supplies in the Sierra Vista Subwatershed to benefit Fort Huachuca and the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area.

Fungicide in orange juice, Arsenic in apple juice, Listeria in cantaloupe--these are the latest “food safety issues you care about” listed at foodandwaterwatch.org. But how important are these issues? The public can see Food and Drug Administration reports on all three by going to the FDA website. An outbreak of Listeria associated with contaminated cantaloupe caused 30 deaths in 2011, and concern continued in 2012 with an additional death and recalls of potentially contaminated fruit. Washing the fruit before cutting it might have lowered the death toll. Responsibility for food safety lies with the consumer, who should be informed about the real risks of foodborne illness. But it also extends to a wide range of parties including farmers, producers, processors, and establishments that serve food. All of these people need reliable, science-based information to ensure the safety of our food supply.

When the captain announced the plane’s descent, I put my book down and peered out the window as I always do. I saw sand dunes first, leading my eye to a small mountain range flanked by dirt roads and farm fields. The mountains framed successive basins, each with the same dry ground spotted with desert shrubs. After the next range, a city emerged. Densely packed buildings appeared beside finished roads. And the canals ran from the farm fields into the city, running full next to dry riverbeds. It looked a lot like Tucson. But I was in Torreon, Mexico.

The poet Frank O'Hara was obviously on the side of the urbanist when he wrote, "I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy." The urban ecologist looks beyond this view, with its division of the world into the natural environment and areas inhabited by humans, a dichotomy variously expressed as city vs. country, urban vs. rural, or the great outdoors vs. crowded city spaces.

Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief, expressed bewilderment that intruding whites expected Indians to sell land. "Sell a country!" he exclaimed, "Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?"

Several river basins in the world are faced with growing water scarcity and water use conflicts attributed to increasing water demand and competition among users, climate change and variability, and environmental degradation. Addressing these challenges necessitates shifting from the traditional uncoordinated sectoral approach to more integrated and fully participatory approaches supported by credible information generated by reliable and robust technical tools. Combining engineering, economics and hydroclimatological science, hydro-economic tools are well suited to provide reliable and impartial technical information that can support multi stakeholder negotiation and decision making processes in a river basin. This research develops and applies a detailed hydro-economic model to support multi-objective water resources assessments. The model supports integrated assessments of physical and economic impacts of changes in water demand, climate conditions, water resources management objectives and policies, and other system constraints on a basin's water resources. The main contribution of this research is the systematic coupling of detailed water resources and economic assessment models that are capable of (a) representing complex physical system characteristics and constraints; (b) simulating system operation at diverse temporal and spatial scales; and (c) representing water-based economic production processes at a basin scale. The research integrates a wide range of potential climate change impacts into the hydro-economic modeling framework through consideration of multiple future climate change scenarios from 13 Global Circulation Models under the medium and high emission projection scenarios. Economic uncertainty is characterized through conjunctive use of Monte Carlo simulation and Geometric Brownian Motion techniques to generate multiple forecast traces of important economic parameters. The model is applied to the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River basin in the southeast USA as a case study.

D.Phil. / South African water resource management policies as well as the country's water law have been under review over the past three to four years. The Water Law Principles, which were established as part of this review process, indicate a commitment to sustainable development of water resources and the protection of an ecological "Reserve". Such policy goals highlight the limitations of conventional water quality management strategies which rely on stressor monitoring and associated regulation of pollution. The concept of an assimilative capacity is central to the conventional water quality management approach. Weaknesses inherent in basing water management on the concept of assimilative capacity are discussed. Response monitoring is proposed as a way of addressing some of the weaknesses. In fact, the inadequate use of biological indicators and techniques in monitoring and evaluating the quality of resources has been identified as a major factor responsible for the continuing decline in the health of natural resource systems. With advances in environmental monitoring over the last decade, it has become clear that biological techniques and protocols need to become part of monitoring in order to allow effective assessment and protection of aquatic resources. One way of incorporating response measures into resource assessment is through the use of toxicological assays. As an example, a toxicological assessment of the environmental risk associated with an organic pesticide (fenthion) is presented. Acute and chronic assays were conducted with a spectrum of test organisms. These toxicological response results provided an ability to predict the ecosystem response that can be expected from certain concentrations of fenthion in the environment. Theoretically, it would be possible to design a risk assessment experiment for every new anthropogenic substance. However, in terms of cost and time, it would not be practically feasible to execute such experiments. To overcome this problem, a method has been developed to derive water quality criteria for toxic substances using existing toxicological data. This provides water resource managers with a readily available set of values to guide them in decision-making. It is demonstrated how available acute and chronic toxicity data can be synthesised into acute and chronic water quality criteria for the protection of aquatic life. As these criteria are intended to extend protection to ecosystems country-wide, they are very conservative by design. Although a set of numeric water quality criteria provides an important tool to water quality managers, the limitations associated with the use of these criteria must be recognised. x Limitations relate either to the design of toxicity experiments or to the use of a chemical-specific approach alone in water resource management. In order to overcome these limitations, three broad supporting technologies are proposed, namely whole effluent toxicity (WET) testing, sitespecific adjustment of water quality criteria, and in-stream biological assessments. Whole effluent testing aims at evaluating the toxic effects of an effluent on organisms. In doing so, acute and chronic toxicity testing (and thus biological responses) becomes part of effluent regulation. An effluent control programme that incorporates toxicity-based standards and compliance criteria is proposed. One of several approaches that can be used for deriving site-specific water quality criteria is the calculation of a water-effect ratio. It is demonstrated that the water-effect ratio method could result in significant adjustments to the national water quality criteria. Although more development and local testing would be required, such site-specific criteria could be in the interest of both ecosystem protection and economic development. In-stream biological assessments introduces a type of response monitoring which provides insight into the overall integrity of aquatic ecosystems. A comprehensive biomonitoring programme is designed. To adhere to the objectives of this programme, specifications have been developed for the selection of sampling sites, the selection of biological and habitat indicators, and the management of the resulting data. This programme is referred to as the River Health Programme (RHP). The ultimate aim of any monitoring programme is to provide useful data. Such data must contribute to effective decision-making. To ensure that the RHP becomes truly operational as a management information system, a step-wise procedure is proposed for linking the collected data with management actions. It is demonstrated how following of this systematic and iterative procedure would facilitate ongoing learning and improvement of the individual steps (e.g. data collection and assessment, goal setting, selection and implementation of management actions) as well as the overall procedure. As a final step, the dynamics that influence the transition of any new technology from scientific development to operational application are explored. The RHP is used as a case study and theoretical models from the field of the management of technology are used to provide valuable insights. Four key components of the RHP design are analysed, namely the (a) guiding team, (b) concepts, tools and methods, (c) infra-structural innovations and (d) communication. These key components evolved over three broad life stages of the programme, which are called the design, growth and anchoring stages.