Healthy forests act like natural infrastructure: storing and releasing water and reducing wildfire risk. Restoration can improve water supplies, but measuring those benefits has relied on rough estimates that miss the complexity of Arizona’s landscapes. Tributary helps groups measure the real water outcomes of forest restoration projects.

Congratulations to the team from the Center for Hydrologic Innovations that was recently featured by the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative! Graduate student Shraddha Sharma has analyzed the changes in cropping patterns and water use after the drought declaration in the Colorado River, finding impressive differences between tribal and non-tribal irrigation districts.

A new publication in Agricultural Water Management (Wei and Xu, 2025) describes a new method to detect irrigation events by applying explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) to groundwater well records, remotely-sensed indices, and precipitation, with applications in the High Plains aquifer. Congratulations to the authors associated with the Center for Hydrologic Innovations!

Congratulations to the team from the Center for Hydrologic Innovations that was recently featured by the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative! Postdoctoral scholar Zhaocheng Wang described the effort as: “Planet imagery is useful for the type of dryland hydrology we have in Arizona. We trained a machine learning model called a convolutional neural network that can…

The Arizona Water Innovation Initiative (AWII) featured our efforts with the satellite imaging company Planet with respect to water supply and demand estimates in Arizona. See blog at the link below

Please join us for the following seminars in Spring 2023 to be held in the Walton Center for Planetary Health, Conference Room 360 (CEE 591, led by Profs. Tianfang Xu and Ruijie Zeng):