U.S.-Mexico Workshop on Paired and Shared Drylands

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

In this U.S.-Mexico workshop researchers and students from the University of Arizona (UA) and Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) will gather in Mexico City to identify the "grand challenges" in energy, water, ecosystem services and sustainability (SEES) confronting drylands of the U.S. and Mexico and to inventory the relevant resources to address them. The workshop will engage ten researchers from UA and 15 from UNAM with an eye towards developing complementary proposals for a research coordination network (RCN) to NSF's Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program and to CONACyT, NSF's counterpart agency in Mexico. This proposal covers an important topic that the attendees will address in a creative and promising way, relating their work on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to a broader set of dryland settings. The potential attendees constitute a mix of established and early-career scientists, and the research that would result from this interaction will lead to better approaches for managing and responding to vulnerabilities in dryland systems, not only in the U.S. and Mexico, but also in similar environments around the world. The workshop should provide a fruitful setting to stimulate future collaborative activity between UA and UNAM. Two graduate students and three junior faculty will be involved in the workshop and subsequent activities. Involvement of young researchers in collaborative international activities is a major goal of OISE.