Title: How Do Population Growth, Land-use Regulations, and Precipitation Patterns Affect water use? A Fine-scale Empirical Analysis of Landscape Change.

A growing body of literature exists on how human population growth and changes in climatic factors influence the availability of water (Elliot et al. 2014, Prudhomme et al. 2014). These studies typically conclude that climate change is expected to have negative consequences on water availability, an effect that is magnified or exceeded by continued growth in human populations (Vorosmarty et al. 2000, Mcdonald et al. 2010). However, there are several deficiencies associated with how these existing studies from the natural science literature analyze the interconnectedness of the human-water-climate system. For one, the scale of the models that are employed often precludes researchers from accounting for the location-specific nature of how water is used. Failing to recognize the inherently spatial nature of water use compounds the inability of researchers to analyze the role of other spatially-dependent behavioral processes that are associated with population growth, and hence water use. The same can be said for the treatment of climate change in the existing literature. If the effects of climate change on water use are transmitted through intermediate human behavioral processes, ignoring the indirect nature of the relationship will not accurately convey the true localized outcomes that ma