Water Institute Faculty Fellow Jim Jawitz and PhD student Yu Fang publish research on the evolution of human population distance to water in the USA in Nature Communications.

“Human ​societies ​evolved ​alongside ​rivers, but how ​has the ​relationship ​between ​human settlement ​locations and ​water resources ​evolved over ​time?” this is the question that Dr. Jawitz and his PhD student Yu Fang answer in their new paper published in Nature Connections. The authors studied the spatio-temporal relationship between human and water resources in conterminous US from 1790 to 2010 and found that dynamic human distance to water reflects the changing societal reliance on adjacency to major rivers. Their results “reveal a historical coevolution of human-water systems, which could inform water management and contribute to societal adaptation to future climate change.”

Read the full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08366-z