This research addresses the following questions:

• Are policies and management approaches effective to ensure sustained water quality?
• What changes in policy can be specifically identified for more beneficial ecosystem services?

Project overview

The area of policy and management of fresh water permeates all the work in our lab. Humans are currently impacting water resources in unsustainable ways. More proactive management can help ensure healthy aquatic systems for people now and in the future. Some issues we have identified show that implementation of nutrient pollution control measures is currently insufficient to address nutrient pollution, which is strongly connected to land use (Tomczyk et al. 2023, Manning et al. 2020).

Specific geographic areas are also in need of comprehensive water management. For example, our analyses show that cities and communities in the area of the I-85 corridor in the southeastern U.S. face challenging water issues (Jackson et al. 2023) that will require proactive policies to address. We’ve also shown that modifications to the U.S. Clean Water Act have reduced the protection of water resources in the U.S. (Sullivan et al. 2020), but that local, state, and regional policies can provide increased protection.