The Center for Water Policy hosted a virtual Earth Month webinar featuring its 2023-2024 Water Policy Scholar Dr. Grace Bulltail and Research Associate Dr. Parisa Sarzaeim. They spoke on the availability and quality of publicly available tribal-led water-climate-environment (WCE) nexus databases on reservations and tribal lands in the U.S., showcasing the FAIRification process (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) of digital tribal WCE databases.
Dr. Bulltail is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. Her research covers the disciplines of water resource engineering, natural resource management, land use, water quality science, and environmental justice in Indigenous communities. She focused her studies to tribal lands and federally reserved lands where water resources are governed by sovereign tribal nations.
Water resources management on Indigenous lands in the U.S. is a complex issue caused by the lack of high-quality and easily accessible databases. Data availability, discoverability, and accessibility are some of the critical missing pieces of the data sovereignty puzzle and sustainability toward environmental justice for Indigenous communities in the U.S.
This event was co-hosted by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin and is part of a quarterly online water symposium series in partnership with the Great Lakes Higher Education Consortium and Council of the Great Lakes Region.