'I am striving to help sustain Kansas’s water resources'

University of Kansas faculty are striving to advance knowledge, interpret our world, solve problems, spark innovation, create beauty and catalyze imagination through their research, scholarship and creative activity. Through the “I Am Striving” series, we’ll learn more about what inspires KU researchers, as well as the goals and impact of their work.
 

Q&A with Sam Zipper, assistant scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey and assistant professor of geology
 

Explain your research as you would explain it to someone outside your field, such as your grandparents.

I'm an ecohydrologist. Ecohydrologists study interactions between ecosystems and the water cycle. For me, a lot of that focuses how agriculture uses water resources for things like irrigation and how agriculture affects water resources by changing how plants are using water — and, ultimately, what that means as far as runoff into groundwater, rivers and streams.
 

What does your research look like? What methods do you use?

My work uses a mixture of field-based data collection, going out to rivers, streams and wells and collecting information about where the water is and how it's moving. It uses data science from publicly available datasets like the U.S. Geological Survey, streamflow data or meteorological data collected by other organizations. And then we also use computational modeling tools doing simulations of how, under different management or climate practices, we might expect the water resources to change. By putting those three different types of methods together, we can try to develop a holistic understanding of how different interactions might affect surface water resources, groundwater resources and ultimately, what that means for the environment and society.
 

What inspires your research? Why are you passionate about this work?

Like many geologists, I started just because I like to go outside and play around in rivers and streams and lakes. But the reason that I've stuck with ecohydrology, specifically, is that it's very timely science. Water challenges are growing every day here in Kansas and around the world, and it's really valuable for me to be doing work on topics that we need answers and solutions to quickly. Doing this work looking at how humans interact with the water cycle can hopefully help us understand what types of solutions we can use to address a lot of these challenges that we're facing now.
 

How does your research directly impact your field, society, Kansas and the world?

One of the biggest realizations I had when I was coming into the world of hydrologic science is that, at this point, humans are one of the main drivers of the water cycle. In geology, we think a lot about different geological eras, like the Triassic era when the dinosaurs were around. And right now, lots of people argue that we're now in an era called the Anthropocene, where humans are the dominant factor that's shaping how the world around us works. The research that I do focuses on how humans affect water resources and how those water resources, in turn, affect things like the economy, agricultural production, and those other types of activities — which helps us understand how the world of physical science and how the world of society can come together.

I think our research has an impact on Kansas because we're addressing the challenges that Kansas faces every day. At the Kansas Geological Survey, we work really closely with other groups around the state, like groundwater management districts, K-State Extension programs, nonprofit groups like Friends of the Kaw or the Nature Conservancy, all of whom care deeply about the water resources in the state and how those water resources can serve ecosystems and society. So what we try to provide are the scientific underpinning that they can ultimately use to make the right decisions for their organizations and constituencies. We're policy neutral here at KGS. We don't take positions about what people can or should do. But a really critical role is providing the facts and the information that other groups can then go and take to make the decisions that they need to meet their needs.
 

What is a recent study/example of work you’d like to share?

I can give two examples. One study that we've got going on right now is focused on climate change in the future of the Kansas River watershed. The Kansas River comes right here through downtown Lawrence; I bring my kids down there all the time to go play and look at the river. One of the big concerns that I was starting to hear after I moved to Kansas is that western Kansas is facing so many challenges with aquifer depletion and limited water supplies. How do we avoid that here in eastern Kansas, which has more precipitation, typically? This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We're bringing together a team of agricultural and climate modelers, hydrologists, biogeochemists and community geographers who understand how communities can be resilient to change. Looking out 50 or 70 years for this watershed, how are the water resources ultimately going to change? How might they respond to different types of management strategies? And, ultimately, how can we ensure that agriculture can adapt in a way that is still able to be productive, profitable and viable here in the watershed without having negative impacts like we're seeing in western Kansas where we're having major problems with aquifer depletion?

Another project that we're working on right now tries to use satellite data to understand how people are deploying water conservation actions in western Kansas. One of the major processes by which humans affect the water cycle is through irrigation. When people are irrigating, they are changing the amount of water that's moving from the plants up into the atmosphere. So we're working with satellite data developed by NASA and other collaborating organizations in order to track where on the landscape is water being managed differently. And how do those different management practices ultimately affect the amount of water that's being used and the response of the groundwater system? We're working together with a lot of partners out in western Kansas, including a number of different farmers, extension agents and different groups like that to help figure out how we can help take these new advanced digital tools and integrate them into the day-to-day management activities of agricultural communities and agricultural organizations in order to help people make decisions that are going to help them manage water resources in an efficient and responsible way.
 

What do you hope are some of the outcomes of your research and work?

The most important outcomes of what we do is providing the scientific basis for other people to make decisions. Here at the Kansas Geological Survey, we've got a really important role in forming the scientific backbone for state agencies, for legislators, for members of the public or other organizations to make the decisions that they feel are in the best interest of the state. The main outcome that we have is providing rigorously researched, top-of-the-line scientific information that other people can then take into their own organizations and use as the basis for their work.