Faculty Research Update: Analyzing Drivers of Groundwater Depletion in Southern India Eric Tate

Eric Tate is working with fellow investigator, Nandita Basu formally from Civil & Environmental Engineering at The University of Iowa, to determine the natural and societal factors influencing the sustainability of water resources in Southern India.  The pair recently returned from three weeks of fieldwork in rural Tamil Nadu, along with six graduate and undergraduate students.  Undergraduate geography major Joseph Wyckoff is currently analyzing the geospatial data acquired in the field.  The project is supported by the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Tamil Nadu is located in a semi-arid region in the rain shadow of the Western Ghats mountain range, but rainfall is plentiful during two annual monsoons.  For centuries, rural communities in the region have adapted to seasonal variations in water availability by constructing surface water reservoirs called tanks.  The tanks temporarily store monsoonal rains for irrigation and drinking water while also recharging groundwater.  Over the past several decades, many tanks have fallen into disrepair and groundwater levels have plummeted, negatively impacting the livelihoods of rural farmers.  The goal of their research is to develop a conceptual framework and sustainability indicators that describe the drivers of water depletion, focusing on interactions between natural (e.g., climate, geology) and human (e.g., caste, policy) processes.  At the conclusion of the exploratory two-year study, they plan to apply for a larger NSF grant to enable deeper analysis of this coupled natural-human system.

Eric Tate is the Principal Investigator for an NSF grant (2012-2014) called "Monsoon Harvests: Assessing the Impact of Distributed Storage Tanks on the Vulnerability of Subsistence-Level Agriculture in Tamil Nadu, India" with Nandita Basu (University of Waterloo).