40-years of Lake Urmia restoration research: Review, synthesis and next steps.

Public concern over environmental issues such as ecosystem degradation is high. However, restoring coupled human-natural systems requires integration across many science, technology, engineering, management, and governance topics that are presently fragmented. Here, we synthesized 544 peer-reviewed articles published through September 2020 on the desiccation and nascent recovery of Lake Urmia in northwest Iran. We answered nine questions of scientific and popular interest about causes, impacts, stabilization, recovery, and next steps. We find: (1) Expansion of irrigated agriculture, dam construction, and mismanagement impacted the lake more than temperature increases and precipitation decreases. (2) Aerosols from Lake Urmia's exposed lakebed are negatively impacting human health. (3) Researchers disagree on how a new causeway breach will impact salinity, evaporation, and ecosystems in the lake's north and south arms. (4) Most researchers tried to restore to a single, uniform, government specified lake level of 1274.1 m intended to recover Artemia. (5) The Iranian government motivated and funded a large and growing body of lake research. (6) Ecological and limnological studies mostly focused on salinity, Artemia, and Flamingos. (7) Few studies shared data, and only three studies reported engagement with stakeholders or managers. (8) Researchers focused on an integration pathway of climate downscaling, reservoirs, agricultural water releases, and lake level. (9) Numerous suggestions to improve farmer livelihoods and governance require implementation. We see an overarching next step for lake recovery is to couple human and natural system components. Examples include: (a) describe and monitor the system food webs, hydrologic, and human components; (b) adapt management to monitored conditions such as lake level, lake evaporation, lake salinity, and migratory bird populations; (c) improve livelihoods for poor, chronically stressed farmers beyond agriculture; (d) manage for diverse ecosystem services and lake levels; (e) engage all segments of society; (f) integrate across restoration topics while building capacity to share data, models, and code; and (g) cultivate longer-term two-way exchanges and public support. These restoration steps apply in different degrees to other Iranian ecosystems and lakes worldwide.

Author Correction: Assessing data availability and research reproducibility in hydrology and water resources.

In the original version of this Article the author of reference #38 was incorrectly stated as Quinn, J. et al. This has been corrected to Xu, W. et al. in both the HTML and PDF versions.

Assessing data availability and research reproducibility in hydrology and water resources.

There is broad interest to improve the reproducibility of published research. We developed a survey tool to assess the availability of digital research artifacts published alongside peer-reviewed journal articles (e.g. data, models, code, directions for use) and reproducibility of article results. We used the tool to assess 360 of the 1,989 articles published by six hydrology and water resources journals in 2017. Like studies from other fields, we reproduced results for only a small fraction of articles (1.6% of tested articles) using their available artifacts. We estimated, with 95% confidence, that results might be reproduced for only 0.6% to 6.8% of all 1,989 articles. Unlike prior studies, the survey tool identified key bottlenecks to making work more reproducible. Bottlenecks include: only some digital artifacts available (44% of articles), no directions (89%), or all artifacts available but results not reproducible (5%). The tool (or extensions) can help authors, journals, funders, and institutions to self-assess manuscripts, provide feedback to improve reproducibility, and recognize and reward reproducible articles as examples for others.