NCER Assistance Agreement Annual Progress Report for Grant #83582401 - Assessment of Stormwater Harvesting via Manage Aquifer Recharge (MAR) to Develop New Water Supplies in the Arid West: The Salt Lake Valley Example

The aims of the original proposed project remain the same, that is, to test the hypothesis that Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) for stormwater harvesting is a technically feasible, socially and environmentally acceptable, economically viable, and legally feasible option for developing new water supplies for arid Western urban ecosystems experiencing increasing population, and climate change pressures on existing water resources. The project is being carried out via three distinct but integrated components that include: 1) Monitoring of existing distributed MAR harvesting schemes involving a growing number of demonstration Green Infrastructure (GI) test sites; 2) Integrated stormwater/vadose zone/groundwater/ ecosystem services modeling; and 3) Social Science research assessing stakeholder attitudes, and solicitation of their collaboration, through a Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC), on feasible distributed MAR scenario development and subsequent analysis of scenario outcomes. Each of these components are discussed separately in the material presented below