In this presentation, we highlight undergraduate research approaches and projects at Smith College, the largest college for women in the United States. We share lessons learned along with current challenges to spark conversation and improvement. We comprise a hydrologist (Guswa), environmental engineer (Ismail), and aqueous geochemist (Rhodes), and we investigate the effects of landscape, land management, and natural infrastructure on water quality and water resources. Rhodes and her students carryout field work and laboratory analyses to determine the impacts of development on water chemistry, and a recent project investigates the fate and transport of road salt in a calcareous fen in western Massachusetts. Ismail and her students conduct laboratory experiments to assess the efficacy of filter-feeding organisms to improve water quality in natural systems. A recent project determined how environmental conditions affect the uptake of bacteria by zooplankton. Guswa and his students use models to understand the interactions among climate, landscape, and water resources, and a recent project explores the effects on peak flows of a set of plausible land-use futures for New England in 2060. As undergraduates, students join these projects with limited relevant coursework and research experience. We find that undergraduate engagement is best facilitated by activities that are skill- or technique-based (such as making careful measurements) rather than those based on a deep understanding of theory. Additionally, multiple scales of involvement (e.g., newer students attending group meetings and more senior students designing experiments and serving as peer mentors) allow students to explore potential interests and possibly persist to richer levels of involvement.

Decision makers and water managers throughout New England desire to understand how development and land-use change, especially under a changing climate, will affect high flows, flooding, and stormwater. We use the New England Landscape Futures (NELF) project to demonstrate the potential for translating participatory scenarios to simulations of land use and land cover and the resulting effects on streamflow. In addition to projecting recent trends, four other landscape scenarios were co-designed through a structured process that engaged over 150 stakeholders and scientists from throughout New England. Daily streamflows were simulated with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to investigate how high flows vary among the scenarios for the less developed Cocheco River watershed in southeast New Hampshire and the more urbanized Charles River watershed in eastern Massachusetts. The hydrologic response of each land-use scenario was simulated for both historic weather (1999-2017) and downscaled weather for 2049-2067 from the CCSM 4.0-RCP 8.5 model-pathway from the Community Earth System Model. Differences among the land-use scenarios led to no differences in average annual water yield and ET. Loss of forest and increase in urban area reduces the baseflow contribution to streamflow while increasing storm runoff. This shift in partitioning did not affect the frequency of high flows (5% exceedence). The increase in runoff did lead to a concomitant increase in the average annual maximum flow, and the effect is larger in the Charles River watershed than in the Cocheco. Under the future climate, a combination of increased precipitation and decreased potential evaporation results in increased streamflow relative to the scenarios modeled with the historic weather. As a fraction of precipitation, surface runoff remains the same, and baseflow increases. The frequency of high flows increases, with the 5%-exceedence flow (under historical weather) being met or exceeded 8-9% of the days. Annual maximum flows also increased for the future climate, and the effects of land-use change and climate on annual maximum flows are comparable. These water-related results fit into a larger framework for evaluating ecosystem services associated with socially relevant landscape scenarios.