The following projects are on-going or upcoming as part of the Great Salt Lake Social Science Network.
| Project Title | Lead Contact | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Vulnerability and Resilence in the Face of a Desiccating Great Salt Lake | Jennifer Givens | Our objectives for this project are two-fold: First, to understand how recently arrived international immigrants along the Wasatch Front perceive risk, vulnerability, and resilience as it relates to Great Salt Lake desiccation; and second, to understand how immigrant- and refugee-serving community organizations conceive of these same risks and work to mitigate environmental impacts upon the communities they serve. |
| Investigating perspectives on converting water intensive cropland in the Great Salt Lake watersheds | Stacia Ryder | We seek to understand what collaborative governance efforts growers in these watersheds would support. Further, what role do they see for themselves in processes for co-developing water conservation policies? Answering these questions could assist communities adapting to drought conditions in the west. In Utah, it will inform policy to address the urgent crisis of a drying GSL while evaluating growers’ attitudes towards alternative land uses. |
| Utah People & Environment Poll | Jessica Schad | In spring 2023, faculty and graduate students from eight programs and two colleges at USU put together the first iteration of the Utah People and Environment Poll or UPEP. The objective of the UPEP is to periodically (every 1-2 years) survey adult Utah residents about their perceptions on longstanding and emerging environmental and natural resource issues of importance to the state and use the data to inform research and decision-making related to social-environmental issues. The UPEP uses a high quality probability-based sampling methodology to provide a true representative survey of Utah residents. Questions on issues such as: Great Salt Lake, natural resource management, environmental health, energy, water and drought, air quality, public lands, climate change, wildfires, snowpack, etc. |
| Utah Wellbeing Survey Project | Courtney Flint | Since 2019, we have partnered with cities and towns throughout Utah to survey residents about their wellbeing, local concerns, and more. in 2024, one of the concern items was the Great Salt Lake so we have those data from approx 17,000 Utahns around the state. |
| Local Water Management Organizations in Utah and the GSL Basin | Courtney Flint | We interviewed and surveyed representatives of irrigation companies in the GSL Basin and surveyed municipalities across Utah regarding various aspects of water management. This include perspectives on the Great Salt Lake. |
| Immigrant-Serving Community Organizations' Role in Mitigating Environmental Injustice in the Wasatch Front | Kirsten Vinyeta | We interviewed immigrant-serving community orgs regarding perceptions of environmental risk among immigrants as it pertains to GSL desiccation, as well as actions being taken by these orgs to mitigate these risks. |
| Immigrant Perceptions of Air Pollution / Environmental Risk along the Wasatch Front | Kirsten Vinyeta | We have interviewed English and Spanish-speaking foreign-born immigrants to understand their perceptions of environmental change and risk along the Wasatch Front, including as it pertains to GSL desiccation. We will eventually use this data to compare immigrant perspectives with immigrant-serving community org perspectives from the study above. |
| Landscape Conversion and its Multispecies Justice Potential in the Context of GSL desiccation | Kirsten Vinyeta | We are interviewing homeowners in Cache Valley who have replaced part or all of their turf lawn with waterwise landscaping to understand the opportunities and barriers of landscape conversion as well as its multispecies justice potential in the context of augmented biodiversity and water conservation. We are also developing landscape conversion models to estimate water savings under different landscape conversion scenarios. We will follow this study up with a content analysis of HOA Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions in Cache Valley to understand how HOA rules facilitate or inhibit landscape conversion among homeowners. |