It wasn’t what he expected to find.
Darren Ficklin, an associate professor in the geography department at Indiana University, was lead author for a study that compared natural and managed watersheds in the continental United States and Canada. He expected to find differences among natural watersheds and managed watersheds, which include dammed lakes, concrete rivers and other waterways that people control in some way.
Instead, all across the two countries, the data showed that the trends in natural waterways and managed waterways mirrored each other — and were all affected by climate change.
In the Southwest, where rivers and streams are drying up, so are reservoirs and lakes. In the Northeast, where there is an abundance of water in rivers, there is also more than enough water in reservoirs and lakes.
“The take-home message is the trends in managed watersheds are happening in natural watersheds as well,” Ficklin said. “This is brand-new stuff.”
Before this first-of-its-kind study, other research had focused on the effects of climate change on natural waterways, not on managed waters. The significance of the study is that it shows climate change is affecting water that’s used for agricultural purposes as well as water used for drinking water and aquatic ecosystems throughout the country. In other words, having people control the water doesn’t alter the effects of climate change.
Ficklin is a member of the Environmental Resilience Institute at IU, a part of IU’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge. His plan was to take a broad look at the overall precipitation and evaporation of waterways and not to look at specific regions or even the severity of drought or flooded areas. “I went in (to the study) trying to collect as much data as I could,” Ficklin said. “I have not done this type of work with streams at this scale before.”