Dr. Becky Teasley is collaborating on a $1.6M grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is to analyze interactions between surface water, groundwater, agricultural land use and economics of disadvantaged, rural communities. The work is centered in the Tulare River Basin in the Central Valley of California but the results will be applicable to other areas working to balance economics and scarce water resources. Dr. Teasley is working with Helen Dahlke (PI) UC Davis Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, and the other Co-PIs on the research team include Jon Herman in the UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Anne Visser and Clare Gupta in the UC Davis Department of Human Ecology and Laurel Firestone from the nonprofit Community Water Center. Dr. Teasley will be helping to build physical models of the basin and will be utilizing game theory techniques to explore the effects of collaboration between the agricultural users and the disadvantaged communities.
Dr. Teasley completed both her masters and doctoral work on water management in the Rio Grande/Bravo basin and is currently continuing her research efforts in the basin. She is working on a collaborative project with Michigan Tech, University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University and University of Texas at El Paso. This work focuses on water management under climate change in the portion of the Rio Grande/Bravo basin that starts at Elephant Butte reservoir and flows to the confluence with the Rio Conchos in Mexico.
In addition to working on water management in water scarce regions. Dr. Teasley has started a Sea Grant funded project with Dr. Karen Gran (project PI) and Dr. Salli Dymond (both from Earth and Environmental Sciences), and Josh Dumke (NRRI). This project focuses on low flow hydrology around beaver dams in the Knife River. Dr. Teasley will be helping to build a physically based water balance model of the beaver dams to help describe the effects of the dams on low flow hydrology.