The Water Center brings together a rich history in water related education and research with diverse talent from 25 different departments at Colorado State University to form a group of educators and researchers interested in water resources.
Founded in 1870, Colorado State University charted a course to shape its land-grant mission to provide academic excellence, quality research, and service to the state, nation, and world. Colorado State University, located in Fort Collins, has an enrollment of 22,000 students. Fort Collins, a community of more than 100,000 people, is located 65 miles (about 100 kilometers) north of Denver. At an elevation of 5,000 feet (1,525 meters), it rests at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
Colorado State is a land-grant institution that has achieved an international reputation as a center for water resources education, research, and service. In 1883, Elwood Mead (for whom Lake Mead is named) initiated the irrigation engineering program. In that same year, the State Board of Agriculture, Colorado State's governing board, approved the establishment of a Department of Civil and Irrigation Engineering, which eventually became the College of Engineering.
In the early 1900s, Ralph Parshall, one of the University's first civil and irrigation engineering students and inventor of the Parshall Flume, aided in the design of Colorado State's first hydraulics laboratory. Today, the hydraulics facilities are ideally located in the Engineering Research Center adjacent to Horsetooth Reservoir.
For the last 30 years, Colorado State's water projects at home and overseas have involved experts from engineering, agriculture, and a number of other disciplines. This cross-disciplinary approach prepares Colorado State's water resources graduates to develop solutions to problems related to the environment, critical water supply, and hazard reduction problems.
In 1990, the Colorado Commission on Higher Education recognized the need for, and future promise of, Colorado State's water resources engineering programs, and designated those programs as one of five statewide Programs of Excellence. Similarly, in 1991 and in 1995, Colorado State designated water resources as one of the University's Programs of Research and Scholarly Excellence.
With increasing recognition of the interdisciplinary character of water issues and opportunities, Colorado State has placed its water programs under the umbrella of The Water Center to enable them to work together to give coordinated and focused attention to students and to society's problems of managing water. The Water Center provides a means for Colorado State to translate its heritage and capabilities into programs of value to its students and other constituents.
Water is fundamental to all life forms, affecting all ecosystems and the various uses to which it is put. Often, these uses compete quantitatively and qualitatively with one another. At the same time, agriculture, industry, and rapidly expanding populations are increasing the demand for this limited resource. As a society, our challenge is how to return water to the source and guarantee that water is not spoiled by waste, land runoff, or other forms of despoliation.
A variety of recent "crises" have focused attention on other dimensions of water resources, including potential climatic shifts, rapid socio-political changes, transboundary dependencies, and increased hazards and challenges from rapid technological developments. Those involved with natural resources must consider such all-encompassing factors as interdependence, turbulence, rapidity of change, economics, and globalization. The complexity of decisions regarding water calls for new conceptual approaches, methodological breakthroughs, and institutional mobilization in integrated, interdisciplinary and multi-objective programs and efforts.
These factors coalesce into a generalized concern with overall water resources research, implementation, and education. Any approach adopted will tend to revolve around the exponential growth of water needs (quantity) and water quality. At the same time, in a complex, interdependent world, there is increasing demand for new institutional arrangements to manage situations arising from complexity and uncertainty.
Today's widespread delivery facilities provide such easy access to water that most people take it for granted, even in Colorado, a state where water is considered the most precious natural resource. Like other western states, Colorado's settlement and subsequent economic progress was possible only by developing water resources from surface waters and underground aquifers.
Surface water supplies developed from natural streams represent the largest source of fresh water supplies. The eastern plains and western plateau regions are semiarid, while the central mountains collect abundant precipitation during the winter and snowmelt in early spring. This water feeds four of the West's major river systems: the Platte, Arkansas, Rio Grande, and Colorado. Mining and agricultural interests were the first to tap water resources from these stream systems. In recent decades, manufacturing and fossil fuel development have stimulated industrial expansion.
Although growth in these activities has placed minimal direct demands on water resources, the increase in population accompanying industrial growth has produced significant increases in the water needed by municipalities, particularly those on the eastern front range. Continued population growth and federal mandates for endangered species habitat and improved water quality will increase future demands for water supplies.
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