Abstract
Water resource science and management is, or can and should be, interdisciplinary and cooperative. Thus, the collaborative nature of water resource management requires the participation of different types of people. Relationships and how those people are arranged can have a significant impact on how research and management is implemented in practice. This seminar will demonstrate how social sciences can improve the understanding of people – different governmental agencies, organizations, and individuals – and their values. Finally, this seminar will share different social science and decision support examples.
Speaker Bio
Kathleen Williams is a Geographer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Great Lakes Toxicology and Ecology Division where she works on an interdisciplinary team that studies the relationships environmental remediation, restoration, and community revitalization in Great Lakes areas using socio-ecological systems approaches to develop tools and collaborative decision support methods. She earned Master’s and PhD degrees in Geography from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where she researched stakeholder participation, including policy implementation and knowledge exchange.