By Renae Simonson
Project submitted through Grand Challenges Scholars program, Sustainable Water Resources Team.
Water conservation issues are often solved through collaborative and interdisciplinary work. In my three-part podcast, I interviewed college faculty members and graduate students, all of whom collaborate with other organizations to work on water conservation from different angles. In the first episode, I talk about why I created this water sustainability podcast, the backgrounds of how researchers got into their fields of work, what their daily work entails, and who they collaborate with. The second episode went over some challenges related to water sustainability. In the third episode, researchers talked about some solutions that they or their colleagues worked on to help conserve water. This science communication project was funded by an undergraduate research scholarship from the University of New Mexico’s Sustainable Water Resources Grand Challenges program, with some additional support from an NSF EPSCoR Track 4 award. This podcast is important for gaining insight about efforts that researchers are doing to monitor different streams and rivers, and lessons they have learned from working as part of conservation teams. In putting this podcast together, I had a lot of fun learning about how to interview, the more technical side of water research, and how effective collaboration is for sustaining water.