Introduction

The Colorado River Basin (fig. 1) is affected by continually increasing demand and competition for natural resources, risks from natural hazards, and the effects of severe drought. Indeed, the Colorado River Basin experienced severe drought during the first two decades of the 21st century (Salehabadi and others, 2022; McCabe and others, 2024). Warmer temperatures (Udall and Overpeck, 2017) and water use exceeding supply (Wheeler and others, 2022; Schmidt and others, 2023) contributed to dwindling water resources. In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) initiated the Colorado River Basin Actionable and Strategic Integrated Science and Technology (ASIST) initiative in response to a demonstrated need to build interdisciplinary¹ connections and scientific knowledge related to drought conditions and associated effects in the Colorado River Basin (Dahm and others, 2023). The complexities of drought and its effects on human and natural systems in the Colorado River Basin necessitate an interdisciplinary approach to provide the data, tools, and communication to address multiple, interwoven resource-management needs. The ASIST initiative is a regional approach to addressing the grand challenges for integrated USGS science (Jenni and others, 2017, p. 2). Consistent with Jenni and others (2017; p. 20), integrated science is defined in this report as the fusion of data, knowledge, and models from multiple science disciplines using existing and new research and technologies. The principal objective of the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative is to provide dedicated support for USGS scientists, science centers, programs, partners, or stakeholders to expand and codevelop interdisciplinary science and technology projects related to drought in the Colorado River Basin. In this report, the term “stakeholder” refers to any person or entity with interests in a resource or location (Tillery and others, 2022). References to stakeholders also apply to partners working with the USGS to produce actionable science. In this report, stakeholders and partners are primarily external to the USGS, and include public land and resource managers from local, State, and Federal agencies; Tribal entities; nongovernmental organizations; and the interested public. The Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative supports collaboration among stakeholders, scientists, and technology specialists to efficiently develop and deliver accurate and actionable scientific products and tools to stakeholders (fig. 2).

To better understand stakeholder science needs related to drought in the Colorado River Basin, members of the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative reviewed stakeholder communications compiled from more than 200 recently published sources (Frus and others, 2021). These stakeholder communications were used to characterize more than 400 stakeholder science needs by assessing their priorities, strategies, missions, and concerns related to drought. Scientific gaps identified in the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021; Tillery and others, 2022) were used to develop the Colorado River Basin ASIST Science Strategy, determining opportunities and directions for the USGS to expand drought science in the Colorado River Basin (Dahm and others, 2023). The Colorado River Basin ASIST Science Strategy highlights the importance of expanding integration across science disciplines and using advanced information management technology (IMT) to increase efficiency, enhance innovation, and advance ongoing science activities and new science directions related to drought.

In April 2021, in response to the need for integrated science and based on input from USGS experts and challenges identified in the Colorado River Basin ASIST Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021; Tillery and others, 2022) and the Colorado River Basin ASIST Science Strategy (Dahm and others, 2023), the Colorado River Basin ASIST team selected 12 topics representing a variety of stakeholder drought science needs and science priorities for discussion (table 1). Members of the Colorado River Basin ASIST team then organized 12 Science and Technology collaboration meetings (hereafter referred to as “S&T meetings”) to discuss each topic. The S&T meetings assembled USGS experts from different science fields related to the 12 topics for discussion of challenges, knowledge gaps, existing capabilities, and solutions related to drought science in the Colorado River Basin. The meetings were also intended to generate science questions and identify (1) technologies that may increase efficiency and innovation related to research, environmental, and societal challenges; (2) opportunities for future engagement among participants; and (3) priorities for the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative to facilitate integrated science (Dahm and others, 2023). Meeting participants discussed interdisciplinary approaches to develop actionable science and meet stakeholder needs, thereby connecting USGS experts working on complex scientific problems.

Approach

The USGS is organized into disciplinarily defined mission areas, each with individual science strategies and programs that support and organize the USGS capacity for addressing complex science problems in coordination with other agencies (Ostroff and others, 2017). As of 2024, the USGS has five mission areas: Core Science Systems, Ecosystems, Energy and Minerals, Natural Hazards, and Water Resources. Each mission area has mission-specific directives, funding models, stakeholder-engagement strategies, and programmatic support for projects conducted by scientists with diverse experience and skillsets, technological capabilities, and science capacities. Summarizing responses from experts from across the USGS required an organizing framework relevant to all mission areas and Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative objectives. A three-part framework was therefore used to gather, summarize, and interpret response data:

A common vocabulary was required to standardize participant responses across a diversity of training, duties, and backgrounds and to compare response terms with the terms also used in the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021; Tillery and others, 2022). Vocabulary terms from the USGS Thesaurus (USGS, 2022b) and the USGS Data Lifecycle Model (Faundeen and others, 2014) were chosen to summarize participant responses to meeting topics and discussion prompts. There were two additional considerations that motivated our creation of a common vocabulary: (1) maintaining cohesion with ongoing focus areas of Colorado River Basin ASIST, including integrated science (Dahm and others, 2023), stakeholder engagement (Tillery and others, 2022), and IMT (Anderson and others, 2022), and (2) using an organizing framework relevant to all mission areas and Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative objectives to inform future collaborative meetings.

Science and Technology Collaboration Meetings

In June and July 2021, experts from USGS science centers and mission areas across the United States were invited to participate in 1 or more 3-hour online meetings, each centered on 1 of 12 topics related to drought in the Colorado River Basin (table 1). Outreach materials (announcements, information about meeting topics, save-the-dates, and registration links) were distributed through the Rocky Mountain Region Science Exchange, the Colorado River Basin ASIST email lists, the Rocky Mountain Regional Director, center directors from the USGS Rocky Mountain and Southwest Regions, the USGS Community for Data Integration, the USGS Risk Research and Applications Community of Practice, and the S&T meeting participants. Meetings were held virtually during regular work hours, and no additional compensation was offered to participants for their participation. Microsoft Teams software was used for meetings and to solicit participant input using a virtual whiteboard (fig. 3). In addition to providing information on their professional background, participants contributed free-form responses to six open-ended prompts motivating discussions specific to each meeting topic: (1) “Challenges,” (2) “Existing Capabilities,” (3) “Example Applications,” (4) “Knowledge Gaps,” (5) “Strategies and Actions,” and (6) “Next Steps.” Refer to table 2 for further details on each prompt. General discussion prompts were initially modified for relevance to each meeting topic (for example, “Brainstorm challenges related to integrated science to study groundwater-dependent streams, ecosystems, and research in the Colorado River Basin” was used for the Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystems meeting), but additional questions could be posed by the facilitator based on the participants in attendance and what was previously discussed during the meeting.

Participant responses were recorded on individual “sticky notes” on the virtual whiteboard, and popular responses could be electronically upvoted by fellow participants wishing to emphasize similar ideas (fig. 3). Typical responses were in the form of complete sentences or sentence fragments and were qualitative in nature. For example, one response to the “Challenges” prompt in the meeting about climate change (table 1) was “Understanding what type of information stakeholders and decision makers need most and in what form” (fig. 3). After all collaboration meetings were completed, participant responses were exported to a spreadsheet, organized by meeting topic and discussion prompt, and upvotes for each response were tallied.

Response Summary

After collecting participant responses, USGS Thesaurus terms were used to organize response data (USGS, 2022b). The USGS Thesaurus was created to categorize science topics and methods and was previously used by the Colorado River Basin ASIST team to organize stakeholder communications (Frus and others, 2021; Tillery and others, 2022). The hierarchy of the USGS Thesaurus also allows for collapsing or expanding terms into precise categories, thereby facilitating the analysis of responses without losing information. Each response was examined for relation to one or more USGS Thesaurus terms used in the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021). The Stakeholder Needs Assessment list consisted of 73 thesaurus terms, and 5 additional terms were added from the USGS Thesaurus (USGS, 2022b) to better characterize S&T meeting responses (78 terms total; for additional details, please refer to Monroe and others, 2024). To increase the relevance of response characterization to IMT, we also assigned as many as five terms from the USGS Data Lifecycle Model (Faundeen and others, 2014) to each response (“acquire,” “process,” “analyze,” “preserve,” and “publish”). We did not use the term “plan” as this was not a focus of meeting discussions, but we recognize its importance for the USGS Data Lifecycle Model (Faundeen and others, 2014). Terms from the USGS Thesaurus and the USGS Data Lifecycle Model were then used to identify and summarize responses relevant to three Colorado River Basin ASIST priorities: integrated science, stakeholder engagement, and IMT. Terms from the USGS Data Lifecycle Model were only used to summarize responses for IMT. Terms assigned to each response are available as a USGS data release (Monroe and others, 2024). Discussion prompts and meeting names also were used to provide additional context to responses. The first author of this report assigned terms, and they were reviewed by multiple Colorado River Basin ASIST team members. Summaries were restricted to unique responses and upvotes were not used to weigh summaries.

Outcomes

From the 12 meetings, 865 individual responses were registered from 79 participants representing 43 unique affiliations (self-reported work locations of city, science centers, mission areas, or regional offices; table 1). Many participants (30 participants, 38 percent) attended more than one meeting. Participants represented a variety of science disciplines including chemistry, computer science, ecology, geography, geology, geomorphology, hydrology, and social sciences. Data collected in the S&T meetings likely constitute the most expansive interdisciplinary input as of 2024 within the USGS for science and technology priorities specific to the Colorado River Basin. The discussion prompts with the greatest number of responses were “Challenges” (217) and “Existing Capabilities” (199) followed by “Knowledge Gaps” (137), “Strategies and Actions” (127), “Example Applications” (120), and “Next Steps” (65). The USGS Thesaurus is organized as a hierarchy and the highest-level terms (Tier 1) are grouped into categories that include “Methods,” “Product types,” “Sciences,” and “Topics.” (The “Topics” category is further defined as “themes, subjects, and concerns for which USGS information resources are relevant”; USGS, 2022b.) Among the top 20 (out of 78) USGS Thesaurus terms assigned to responses across all S&T meetings, terms common to both the S&T meetings and the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021; Tillery and others, 2022; fig. 4) were almost exclusively in the “Topics” category (9 out of 10 terms; Monroe and others, 2024). Conversely, most USGS Thesaurus terms seldom assigned in the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (less than 10 out of 484 science needs, or less than 3 percent) but frequently assigned in the S&T meetings were in the categories “Methods” (5 out of 10 terms) or “Product types” (1 out of 10 terms; Monroe and others, 2024; fig. 4). This result reflects a more technical focus of many responses from S&T meetings compared with responses from the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021).

Summarizing Participant Input—Success and Limitations

Grouping responses by discussion prompts allowed the Colorado River Basin ASIST team to efficiently search for responses by topics such as “Knowledge Gaps,” “Example Applications,” or “Strategies and Actions.” Discussion prompts also offered helpful context when responses lacked details, such as only mentioning a project name or website. This assessment also represents the first known application of terms from the USGS Data Lifecycle Model (Faundeen and others, 2014) to characterize and summarize responses. Using five USGS Data Lifecycle Model terms (“acquire,” “process,” “analyze,” “preserve,” and “publish”) provided insights beyond what was revealed from our set of USGS Thesaurus terms (USGS, 2022b; Monroe and others, 2024).

Meeting structures and terms assigned to participant responses were used with mixed success to extract insights relevant to integrated science, stakeholder engagement, and IMT. For example, existing integrated science projects discussed in the meetings often included data delivery and visualization websites, rather than examples of integrated research. The lack of integrated research examples suggests either limits to our approach of identifying responses assigned with more than one science-related term (Monroe and others, 2024) or that integrated science examples were underrepresented among responses. It is also possible that truly integrated research is still uncommon in practice.

This assessment also revealed challenges with summarizing and interpreting responses to questions relevant to the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative. Some challenges were inevitable given the qualitative and exploratory nature of these meetings, and, therefore, the inability to foresee exactly what the response data would look like and how those data should be analyzed. The data-analysis approach was also hampered by the subjective nature of categorizing qualitative responses using USGS Thesaurus terms (USGS, 2022b). Interpreting USGS participant responses using the lens defined by the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021) enabled direct comparison between the datasets (fig. 4) but also contributed to potential information loss when the USGS Thesaurus terms were too general. The focus on science-related terms reduced specificity among more methodological terms related to IMT, represented by only three USGS Thesaurus terms (“information technology methods,” “computational methods,” and “data communication”). Using broad terms to search for responses also created challenges in summarizing numerous responses (for example, there were 86 responses to the “Existing Capabilities” discussion prompt assigned with IMT-related terms; Monroe and others, 2024). Finally, it should be emphasized that the responses reported here do not represent a complete census of science needs and capabilities related to drought in the Colorado River Basin. In addition to USGS staff that did not attend, some participants may have attended to listen and learn rather than provide input (nonresponse bias). Similarly, the upvote feature of the virtual whiteboard likely reduced redundancy among responses and allowed participants to indicate consensus during discussions. However, because voting was apparently used inconsistently, and the use of upvoting likely depended on factors including meeting topic, the number of participants, and their propensity to engage, it was difficult to use and interpret this metric across the different S&T meetings. As such, upvotes could not be used as an affirmation or prioritization of responses.

Future S&T meetings could benefit from designing analysis-ready data collection strategies. The USGS Thesaurus terms (USGS, 2022b) used for the Stakeholder Needs Assessment (Frus and others, 2021) constrained our inferences regarding IMT challenges and needs, suggesting the importance of selecting the terms most relevant to subsequent analysis. Responses could also be ambiguous, contributing to subjectivity in assigning terms, increasing uncertainty, and reducing reproducibility. Allowing participants to select their own USGS Thesaurus terms or having a discussion on common terminology among interdisciplinary groups could reduce subsequent ambiguity and subjectivity when summarizing responses. Collecting, interpreting, and summarizing responses can be improved with more systematic approaches such as qualitative coding (Guest and others, 2012) and affinity mapping and clustering (Scupin, 1997). Furthermore, whereas responses were submitted anonymously for this study, the ability to identify response authors could allow for followup and clarification, but that capability should be weighed with effects on participation and privacy concerns. Additional consideration also is needed on how to apply or modify the upvote function, for example, by requiring all participants to rank each response by importance. Finally, depending on the meeting topic and objectives, the number of discussion prompts could be expanded or refined, for example, along administrative, scientific, or technical themes.

Main Takeaways for Integrated Science Planning

In addition to the benefits of convening USGS staff to develop integrated science questions and approaches related to drought in the Colorado River Basin, staff from several USGS projects and programs expressed interest in using insights from participant responses to enhance their own disciplinary-focused project teams. To that end, the following lists of priorities for integrated science, stakeholder engagement, and IMT use are offered. After ranking 137 responses to the “Knowledge Gaps” discussion prompt by the number of science-related terms (Monroe and others, 2024), responses were synthesized into priorities for integrated science in Box 1.

Searching for responses mentioning tools (such as technology, training, and best practices) and barriers to successful stakeholder engagement (58 responses from “Challenges,” “Knowledge Gaps,” and “Strategies and Actions” discussion prompts) or responses mentioning applications of IMT (162 responses from all discussion prompts) identified strategies and roles for the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative to facilitate integrated science in the Basin (Monroe and others, 2024). Based on these responses, priority actions are listed to facilitate stakeholder engagement (Box 2) and to develop IMT (Box 3) for USGS scientists researching drought-related integrated science in the Colorado River Basin.

Conclusions

In response to decades-long, severe drought across the Colorado River Basin, in 2021, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Colorado River Basin Actionable and Strategic Integrated Science and Technology (ASIST) initiative held 12 Science and Technology collaboration (S&T) meetings with USGS staff to discuss complex issues related to drought. Conversations related to each meeting topic were facilitated by a series of discussion prompts, and responses from participants were interpreted and summarized using terms from the USGS Thesaurus and the USGS Data Lifecycle Model. Contrasting information from the S&T meetings with information from a 2021 stakeholder needs assessment highlighted the science information and processes prioritized by the USGS and other stakeholders. Participant responses also prioritized integrated science, stakeholder engagement, and information management technology to address drought-related science needs in the Colorado River Basin. The organization and summary of responses collected during the S&T meetings proved invaluable for continuing collaboration and integration efforts, including a workshop for codesign held by the Colorado River Basin ASIST team in 2023. Three broad themes (integrated science, stakeholder engagement, and information management technology) were again emphasized for codesign discussions based on the goals of the Colorado River Basin ASIST initiative and priorities elevated by scientists during the S&T meetings. Priority issues and lessons learned from this assessment will help foster the continued improvement of collaboration and integration efforts by the Colorado River Basin ASIST team and across the USGS.