 Good afternoon and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's Lakeable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen and I appreciate joining us again. We are going to talk about a very likeable topic today. We're going to be talking about water and groundwater in Hawaii in particular, but we're going to be looking at three different lens, the lens of team science. Lots of science these days has become more complex where science is no longer done just as biology or just as chemistry or just as physics, but the kinds of projects that are done require people from very diverse disciplines to step together, to step into teams and work together. And today we have three guests here all associated with the Ikea Hawaii project. Peter Adler, Gwen Jacobs, and Greg Chung, the former from Accord 3.0 Network and the latter two from UH. So maybe start out by telling us a little bit about what Ikea Hawaii is and why or how it is a diverse team. Great. Yes, thank you and just delighted to be here. So Ikea Hawaii is an EPSCOR funded project funded by the National Science Foundation. So just since our viewers probably don't know EPSCOR is an acronym? Oh yes, EPSCOR is an interesting acronym that stands for the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. This program specifically funds research projects that are a benefit to the state. And Ikea Hawaii, which was funded last year, is focused on water sustainability, has four main components. One is a research component to try to understand more about how our aquifers function. The second is a capacity building and education component. We're recruiting new faculty at both Manoa and UH Hilo, educating graduate students in postdocs. The third is a significant community engagement piece because all of the research that we do, we want to translate into hopefully help for decision makers in the state. And the fourth is an infrastructure project for which we will be building a centralized data repository of water data for the state. Excellent. Excellent. And I know, Peter, you've been working with them on this whole team science business. So why is this a challenge for your career? Well, you know, and many of your listeners would know and observers, that so much of historical science was done by sole researchers working on great big things, whether it was Gregor Mendel or whether it was Madame Curie. But science doesn't work that way anymore. Once in a while, but more often it's big enterprises well funded. Well, not always well funded, but funded. And with teams, teams of different people and more and more it's interdisciplinary. So social scientists and physical scientists and biological scientists need to find out how to work together on a common problem. So that's where the team science piece fits into this. Team science is basically a number of researchers or a number of teams of researchers who are working on common questions. Right. And the public may not typically realize it, but scientists sort of grow up speaking different languages, right? They learn the language of the discipline they're trained in. Biologists learn how to talk about different species and different biological machinery. Physicists learn to talk about phenomena in their own language. And it gives people very blinders almost, right? They begin to focus in more and more narrowly. And so getting teams to work effectively together is a real challenge. And then there's the whole actual, the whole other challenge, which is this business you mentioned about engaging the broader community. And Greg, that's a big part of what your role is, right? Correct. So what are the particular challenges here? Well, you know, the internal challenges, as we've described are really sort of bringing people who come from different disciplines and have different terms of art and different models and different approaches to their work and figuring out a way to how you bring that together. This project also has the additional knowledge of ensuring that our research is aligned with the decisions that policymakers and regulators, in this case, water regulators, are needing to make. And that involves bringing in a whole another set of interests and issues, language, approaches, priorities. And aligning the science with the decision support needs sometimes is a bit of a challenge because there's a lot of translation that has to go back and forth both ways. Translating the needs, the policy needs, the decision making needs to a science hypothesis or problem, and vice versa taking that technical information and translating it into a policy decision or policy implication. Right, right. And this is complicated too by the fact that lots of different people have vested interests in our groundwater supplies, right? And rather, unfortunately, rather different interests. The cultural community, the military has interests in it, the average person on the street, the communities wish to preserve the land, all these people, the tourist industry, and a number of these groups actually have considerable, shall we say, legal interests in the groundwater of Hawaii. So we have to sort all this out in this project too, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of our partners that we're partnering with in the project is the USGS, the Water Branch here, because they are, they have been building a lot of the hydrological models in the state for many years. So we're partnering very closely with them. I think also the way we designed EQI is it's really designed as one integrated science project other than a set of parallel projects that we hope will knit together at some point. So each of the components that I mentioned before, all four components are really interrelated. So the stakeholder work will drive the type of science questions that we work on. The science then also drives our ability to recruit new faculty and new graduate students. And then the infrastructure platform needs to support it all. So all the members of the team really have to understand each other's science and understand each other's languages. So that's a significant challenge because we have geophysicists, geochemists, software engineers, social scientists. Yeah, it's a very mixed bag. Right. And so you've dealt with some of these kinds of challenges in past projects. Do you see unique ones here, unique challenges? Well, this is a wonderful project. First let me just say this is a fabulous project and it's a sizable grant and brings a lot of new intellectual firepower into the state to work on some pretty tough issues. And these disciplines do need to work together. No one discipline has all the answers. The economists can't answer it, hydrologists can't answer it. So it's a dispersed problem and a dispersed knowledge set. And that's the trick here is to bring for Gwen and Greg and the others to bring that together to try to answer some common questions. Uber questions, superordinate questions. So what do you, that's sort of the next question of what are these sort of big driving questions here? Well, just at the science level and also again this is really driven very much by the needs of the decision makers in the state and what we've learned just through much of our initial research and I think this has been known for some time is that we don't really understand some of the basic aspects of how our aquifers work. We don't understand how much water there is in the aquifers and how long it will last. We also don't understand well the pathways in which water flows through the aquifers which has all kinds of implications for management boundaries as well as contamination issues. So it's a very complex science problem in and of itself and then also integrating all of the stakeholder needs and feedback also adds another dimension to it. That water just won't stand still. The other challenge is we're dealing every island because of the age differences of the island presents a different subsurface geology and all of that impacts greatly how those aquifers operate. Right and it's not just like a bunch of water sitting there all in one big bolus in the middle of the hills that you can just sort of draw out. There are impermeable and permeable regions and they're sort of contained water that's held up separately from others and as this gets explored I know particularly on the big island they found more water, much deeper, more fresh water, much deeper than they expected which I suppose is good news right. But it is surprising to many people when they hear oh we have 30 years of water left here on Oahu which should worry you anyhow because it's not very long time but to realize that we really don't have any real clue about how much water there is. I mean we really don't have much estimate at all right. That's true and I think and also the other challenge for us that really is a unique Hawaii challenge is about the geology. We live in a volcanic island so many of the models and techniques and approaches that might work well in California or other areas won't necessarily work for us because we really need to understand that substructure in order to have a good representation of how things will work, how where water flows. Right, we have water that flows in and flows out under off the coast and into the ocean as fresh water that we never sort of see right it just passes through the whole island and they don't that doesn't tend to happen in a continental system right. It's true and we also have wells in which when they test the age of the water the water is 4,000 years old so that suggests that that's coming from a well that's completely contained and may not and is unlikely to be replenished on a regular basis. And that's of course then the other part of this is right this our state is growing actually growing quite rapidly our water needs are increasing probably even more rapidly than our growth and how can we figure out where to develop where to look for water where to get our water from plus how to of course dispose of our wastewater in ways that aren't going to be as sort of sustainable as possible right. A lot of people want to live in places that are dry and sunny and have a golf course in the swimming pool so there may be plenty of water you know just around the corner but it's not there. So there's a lot of movement that may need to happen and you really need to study that so you don't overdraw it. Sure, I mean we saw the big agricultural boom of Hawaii's past actually drained some of the aquifers right and streams stop flowing out of the mountains and things because literally the water table from some of the very highest water just dropped. So it's a sobering thought because we don't want that to happen too much further down. Absolutely. Yeah I mean I guess the one variable that is known we can tell pretty much accurately how much water we're pumping out we can make probably some guesses how much water comes in from the rainfall but beyond that there's really everything else is pretty gray right. Absolutely and you mentioned submarine freshwater discharge I mean that's an area that we really don't understand I mean we some of our researchers have looked at the freshwater coming up at the coast but as you indicated on the big island there's clearly a lot more water coming out at much deeper depths and that's a variable that we have really very little understanding of. Right and it's critical if the whole island is really a quick and simple flow through system then a few years of drought will very rapidly lead to very serious problems. If instead there's large reservoirs and what you're seeing draining out is indeed a tiny fraction of what's coming in and for many years earlier that then it's a different business right we have. You know given what is really emerging now on climate change sea level rise getting more precision on water for water management understanding how aquifers do and don't connect where the pockets of water are and aren't that's going to become even more a pressing issue. Exactly and it's pressing not just here on Hawaii but on any Pacific island and it's I mean UKVI as big and complex as this problem is it's looking really at only two aquifers one on Oahu here and one on the big island and yet even here on Oahu we have nine or eleven major aquifers or something so it's yeah all we're seeing is a little slice and we're trying to get a handle on that to begin to understand well so we know how to apply that same measurement technique that modeling technique to the other aquifers right. Absolutely and I think some of the work that's been done by the Fresh Water Council led by the Hawaii Community Foundation has really looked at this in detail to try to really look carefully at what our risks are and so it's well established that the amount of rainfall that we're getting is decreasing over time and we have some very long term records of that from some of the work of Tom Jambalooka at UH but all indications is that rainfall is decreasing in some areas and also differentially more on the dry side than on the wet side so that bodes poorly for our sustainable water supply. Exactly a lot of challenges, a lot of challenges in upcoming years to face and we're going to talk more about that when we come back. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on Likeable Science. With me today are Gregory Chung, Wen Jacobs and Peter Radler we're all talking about team science and EKVI project please join us again right after the break. Hey everybody that's Ian social media here at Think Tech Hawaii thanks for tuning in and sorry to break into your show if you're listening on the podcast thanks for listening watching on YouTube we appreciate the subscription etc. If you are a long time listener viewer of Think Tech Hawaii you would know that we are on every day five to six hours a day basically streaming stuff that's happening here in Hawaii that matters to everybody worldwide basically. There's a lot of stuff that we've got going on and we're excited about many of them our 2017 is going to be really cool but right now I can tell you that we are on iTunes where you can listen to all of this stuff now. We're really excited about how that's going and we have just started a on the street feature where we take a camera out to the street and stream live to you guys out there and getting what people in the local community out what they want or are thinking about and sharing that with you and we're really excited about all that stuff we're really excited about you guys watching and following us on all the social media sort of things Instagram Facebook Twitter all that good stuff look for us Think Tech H.I. watch us on Olelo thank you so much everybody here appreciates it hello. And you're back here on likeable science on Think Tech Hawaii I'm your host Ethan Allen I'm here with three wonderful guests today Greg Chung Gwen Jacobs and Peter Adler all involved in various ways with the Ikivai project studying Hawaii's groundwater. Before I get back to our next question so I do want to put in a little plug for an upcoming event the March for Science on Earth Day if you're not don't know about it go to March for Science Hawaii and find out about it well worth it. Now so we talked in sort of some general terms in the first part about the challenges of cross-disciplinary communication also so what are some of the techniques and methods you use actually to get the physicists talking to the hydrologists talking to the social scientists so one of the I would say that the center of gravity at the moment is really trying to put together a partnering agreement a compact in which people have some common understandings of the rules of the road for the next four or five years as they work this and those are going to include things like authorship or data how we're going to handle data sets and what can be made public at what stages some of it will be agreement to the fundamental values which are pretty well articulated in this project so we're putting that together we're right in the process of stitching that together and co-hearing people and that includes communication plans and organizational structures making sure that we understand who reports and part of it is the performance of what they've signed on to do in exchange for receiving support but the other part of it is also making sure that we get that cross-disciplinary cross-walking going on so that the what Tim Burnett does on the economics is in consort with what Ali Elqadi or Steve and Anthony are doing on hydrology and on what others are doing on the chemistry and the geophysics and the engineering of that so the whole idea is to say are we focused, are we talking right, are there anomalies in what we're seeing in other words there's one person discovering something that says no what you just discovered that doesn't make sense here so that's where we want to get to is this compact? Right and that helps because it's a sort of iterative process building that it really forces people not just to talk to each other but actually to listen to one another probably even more important. And sign on to some ground rules. Right and that's a really good thing to establish that kind of basic we're all on the same team here it gets almost to that whole idea of what's sometimes called collective impact right? Right that's right. Also I'd say are the ones we have is this is a very young team with many young investigators on this also this team has never worked together before this is the first time we're all embarking on this kind of grand experiment and we're also distributed team as well so we have a whole team over at UH Hilo which we're using different methods to try to communicate with and we'll be bringing new individuals to the team on as we recruit new faculty and postdocs so this agreement that we're putting in place will really be our guiding document to hopefully steer the project. Excellent and you were speaking of some of the technology so the cyber canoe? Yes they're cyber canoe so we're working very closely with Jason Lee's lab at UH Manoa and he's developed this great technology that allows you to not only have a very large scale screen display to be able to put all of our data up there but it also works very well as a collaboration environment. So we have just finished the installation of a new cyber canoe at UH Hilo and we have one at Manoa and so we'll be able to communicate with our colleagues there and that kind of that kind of face to face even though it's virtual is really essential for a project like this. Absolutely and I was also going to say piggybacking off of your earlier question to Peter that another sort of element to the complexity of the project is as we talked about earlier the need to align with our stakeholders interests and needs so there's a whole other set of expectations and rules of the world if you will that for many researchers and academics there's not been used to operating under or by so that adds another element of complexity to bringing this team together. Sure and you want the products of this team and the project to be very useful on several levels very useful sort of research tool but also to be broadly useful to lots of different communities to be able to take this and say oh we can find out more about our water on our island be it Chuk or Palau or wherever right. Yes absolutely and a huge challenge this is a challenge for many large science project is to be able to take the research that we do the new and innovative research and translate that into something that can actually be used by the stakeholders so one of our grand challenges that we're taking on is to develop decision support tools for our water managers that will leverage our research our data infrastructure and many of our hydrological models as well. Right and that decision making process and having it informed processing formed by the best possible science and again that ties back to my earlier plug for the march for science that's what the march for science is all about on a larger scale but it plays out here in the same exact way right so given that we have these very diverse audiences how do we ensure that we're hearing all the voices that need to be heard. As you can probably figure out communication is responsibility of everybody and a huge coordination task both internally and externally and so what we're trying to do is set up really relationships with the water managers the regulators in the state where it is an iterative process as you indicated previously. We're going to be learning together we're already learning some things we're learning about some decision support needs that we did not anticipate that we did not know how to put the proposal together factors that they are now needing to consider in estimates of sustainable yield like impacts to coastal systems coastal ecosystems or impacts to traditional customary rights how do you integrate those kinds of factors into estimates of sustainable yield that's not stuff that we had anticipated and so this is going to have to be this iterative process the only way we can do that is if they become part of the team essentially. I was going to say that sounds like basically the MOUs you were referring to have to be the partnership agreement has to be sort of expanded to include this ever larger group of more and more diverse interests which makes the language of it an ever greater challenge. One of the things we've been learning is that as Greg and I and some others on the team have been going around talking to the water managers and allocators and regulators and they're pretty hungry for tools. They're hungry for very practical kinds of things so that's one of the bridging pieces here that has to happen between sort of town and gown if you will to use an old phrase. We can generate a lot of curious questions and interesting things and researchers follow their noses and they love it but people downtown who say I could really use a visualization tool or a new framework an analytic framework for this or that and we're learning what they want. I mean the clearly the large scale developers need to know you don't want to stick up a thousand room resort and suddenly realize that you don't have any water available nearby. So somebody needs to know that and that translation of the research into actual practical usable terms is a whole sort of second level challenge that many academic projects never face. Many of them are content to be stay within academia basically. Yeah absolutely I think so two things that have happened already that are really encouraging as Peter was saying and Greg and I have been on many discussions with different stakeholders is just how much we've been welcomed in terms of this project and also how willing they are to share their data. So and this is something I didn't know initially going into the project is just how difficult it is to do water research in the state because the data sources are distributed, they're connected, they're hard to access so it's very hard to get the data that you need to do a particular study. And so part of our infrastructure build will be to try to collect those data sources together and then serve that back out to the decision makers so they will have access to this all these tools and this data. Right so part of that process has to be that communication issue where you help everyone understand that really we are all on the same team even if you're from the community and you're from the Department of Land and Natural Resources and you're from the Board of Water Supply fundamentally we all want the same thing here right we all want to 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the road have plenty of fresh water to drink. I often describe this project as much in a cyber infrastructure project as it is a hydrological modeling project because the decision support tools that we are able to create we're going to be really dependent on Gwen and her team. She happens to be Director of Cyber Infrastructure which is very helpful because it's such a big part of our ability to do that translation and build those kind of tools. You might mention also the nexus over to Hawaiian historic knowledge. I think that's a really unusual piece. Yeah you know one of the components of the project is we have a group of researchers who are looking at the archived Hawaiian newspapers that have now been digitized and looking for stories and references to water in our two study areas to see what our kupuna were saying about water as they knew it and understood it. So that research is just beginning and there's a few little things that have started to come out of accounts of Hawaiian farmers drilling and finding water on what we now call Ford Island for example. And so that information will help us sort of focus some of our data collection and also help us focus better understand how water was actually being managed and utilized in these areas. I think it's a really interesting piece of this because it connects historic knowledge that is being revived or brought out, recreated in new forms with contemporary science. So it's trying to put these pieces together. It's another cross-disciplinary walk. Exactly and I mean even that the Hawaiian term for water when you do it twice, five I, it's wealth which suggests that the Hawaiians had a very deep understanding of what really counts in life. I think in addition to the newspaper work we're also going to do interviews and this gives us the opportunity not only to learn more but also to communicate this project to too many of the local residents. So that's a really exciting part of the project as well. By drawing them in of course you hopefully get a better reception for the project. Absolutely. The communities that we're working in really need to, they're beneficiaries of this work. They're the ultimate beneficiaries in some ways of this work. So they need to be part of this process as well. And to the extent that they can actually provide us further input to the science and to the research that's great but we want to make sure that they understand sort of the water resources that they're relying on to live where they do. Excellent. Well I want to thank the three of you, Peter, Gwen, Greg. It's a great pleasure having you on, talking about the interesting intersections of team science and Ikiwai itself. I look forward to further conversations perhaps about these and best of luck with the project. Thank you. You've been watching Likeable Science and we'll be back next week with another show.