Marya Smith
George Washington University, DC·Earth & Environmental Science
In cold regions, rivers are infrastructure: they carry travel routes, fisheries, drinking water and the seasonal rhythms communities plan around. As the Arctic and sub-Arctic warm, those water systems are shifting at the same time as local economies, institutions and settlement patterns change.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Social Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
Arctic
socio-ecological systems
Kuskokwim River
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Identify and analyze changes in hydroclimatological conditions — river flow, ice and climate variables — in the Kuskokwim basin of Alaska and the Selenge basin of Mongolia that affect human activities and ecosystem services.
- Analyze how socioeconomic systems in these riverine regions are changing, including economic, institutional and demographic shifts occurring alongside climate change.
- Carry out community-engaged modeling built on the ecosystem services framework to represent interactions and feedbacks between the water, ecological and social components of each basin at local and regional scales.
- Develop scenarios of plausible future socio-ecological change for Alaskan and Mongolian communities and co-develop adaptation options with local and Indigenous residents, integrating Indigenous knowledge into the analysis.
More about the research
This collaborative project asks how the linked changes in climate, water and society play out for people, ecosystems and infrastructure in two remote river basins, and what adaptation options communities have. The study sites are the Kuskokwim basin in sub-Arctic Alaska and the Selenge basin in northern Mongolia — two regions far apart but facing comparable combinations of hydrological and social upheaval.
Why it matters
Residents of remote northern river basins face changing ice, flow and fisheries at the same time as economic and institutional change, often with little evidence base for local decisions. By producing scenarios of future water and socioeconomic change and publishing results in openly accessible form, this work could help Alaskan and Mongolian communities and policymakers weigh adaptation choices about infrastructure, water and subsistence resources, and offer a transferable approach for other Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrew Kliskey
University of Idaho, ID·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize and evaluate energy-water system configurations in Idaho's Snake River Basin, including storage, efficiency, conservation and governance, across a range of resilience strategies.
Marie Lowe
University of Alaska Anchorage, AK·Earth & Environmental Science
Estimate riverbank erosion rates in the warming Yukon River basin and their effects on water quality and infrastructure, using numerical landscape evolution models and monitoring stations.
Julie Brigham-Grette
University of Massachusetts, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure and model rates of land change and altered water flow caused by rising sea level and collapsing permafrost across villages and traditional-use landscapes in Alaska's Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
The school
George Washington University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $382M a year on research, 225 research doctorates a year.
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