MUSIC Assistant-Director Beaudry Kock on the road: discussing research and the MUSIC program - June 2007

Beaudry Kock, Assistant-Director of MUSIC and PhD student at MIT, has been active in recent months presenting details of his own research and the MUSIC program.
         In December 2006, he presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting in San Francisco, in a special session exploring integrated social-biophysical modeling approaches for water resources management decision-support. His talk entitled Collaborative Multi-Agent Based Simulations: Stakeholder-Focused Innovation in Water Resources Management and Decision-Support Modeling described his ongoing doctoral research in southeast Colorado. There he is partnering with the US Geological Survey, Colorado State University and the US Bureau of Reclamation to design and implement a collaborative modeling process framework. He will work with stakeholders and policy makers in the region within this framework to develop an integrated social-biophysical model to address some of the major social, economic and environmental challenges facing the Lower Arkansas River Basin.
         In March 2006, Beaudry represented MUSIC at the Numerical Modeling-Policy Interface (NMPI) workshop in Stuttgart, Germany. The NMPI is a growing network of modeling and simulation professionals, mostly in water resources fields, interested in bridging the gap between model development and model use. Through substantive research and cultivating links to practitioners, NMPI hopes to ensure numerical Earth systems models are better used. At this workshop Beaudry presented details of the MUSIC program. His talk entitled Seeking new ways to incorporate science into environmental decision making: the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative emphasized MUSIC’s relevance to the NMPI network as an educational program integrating both science and policy. Beaudry also participated in several workshop sessions which identified current challenges to improving the modeling/policy interface, and explored possible roles NMPI members could fulfil in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of this interface.
         In April 2006, Beaudry presented recent work at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in San Francisco, in a special session devoted to research into the generation and evolution of water conflict in the western states of the US. In a talk co-authored with Dr. Herman Karl and entitled Addressing Value-Laden Water Conflicts Using Collaborative Process and Integrated Modeling, Beaudry presented preliminary results from modeling water conflict using agent-based approaches in Idaho and Colorado. Some of his early conclusions included the high degree of variability between conflict dynamics in different regional settings, the importance of institutional capacity for avoiding and mitigating conflict, and the sometimes overwhelming influence of macroscale climatic and economic factors on regional water conflict generation and evolution.
         In June 2007, Beaudry will be participating along with MUSIC Co-Director Dr Herman Karl at a USGS workshop on Partnering and Collaboration. He will be part of a panel on the USGS experience of collaboration through structured decision-making mechanisms.
         If you would like any more information on any of the above talks, Beaudry’s research or the MUSIC program, please contact him at bkock<at>mit<dot>edu, or Dr Herman Karl at hkarl<at>mit<dot>edu.