By Nicholas Pinter and Sarah Yarnell
In late June and July of this year, UC Davis convened an Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) on “International Approaches to Freshwater Management,” bringing 11 top graduate students from across the US to study rivers and management systems in California, Italy, and the Netherlands.
ASIs are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage US grad students in emergent global issues and collaborative international research. This goal is also a central theme of the World Water at UC Davis (worldwater.ucdavis.edu) initiative:
“The search for solutions needs to draw upon the talents and innovative ideas of scientists, engineers, and societal leaders worldwide to overcome traditional and nationalistic paradigms that have so far been inadequate to meeting these challenges.” (Sharp and Leshner, 2014)
Despite two previous UC Davis ASIs – focused on flood science and groundwater and drought management – the road to the 2025 Institute was rocky. In February 2025, Sen. Ted Cruz’s office flagged our NSF funding, along with another 3400 grants as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” For the record, we disagree that training students in water science and management is woke or in any way controversial. Societies need freshwater to drink and to grow crops, and water management is essential for delivering water, coping with droughts, and alleviating flood risks. Fortunately, NSF agreed and so far our project has escaped the fate of others that have been cancelled.
Our 2025 ASI participants included graduate students recruited nationally from programs in hydrology, ecology, geography, water law, and agriculture. They arrived in California on June 27 for three days of field visits and intensive discussion of water-system management, focusing on the Yuba River and its watershed.
The goal of this year’s ASI was to compare the Yuba system with a similar system, the Noce River, in the Italian Dolomites. Only July 2, the group landed in Verona, Italy and drove to the Medieval hill village of Termenago, where we met our partners from University of Trento. Both UC Davis and Trento share a philosophy for teaching field-based science – that it should be as deep in the field and as immersive as possible. The three days in Italy included both rafting down the knotty rapids of the Noce River and a 1000-meter climb to the base of the Dolomite glaciers, where Italy harvests meltwater for hydropower generation and a host of other water uses downstream, including agriculture and drinking water. A highlight of Alpine trekking in Europe is that our climb was capped with a restaurant, serving cold beer and hot latte macchiatos. Current plans are to return in 2026.
From Italy, the group flew to the Netherlands to begin a week-long summer school. This portion of the ASI curriculum was a partnership with IHE Delft, which is the Netherlands university focused solely on international, graduate-level water education and research. The US group was paired with students from Europe, Bangladesh, Mexico, and around the world to compare science paradigms, management strategies, and water technologies and toolkits. The Delft summer school also included a field trip, which included bicycling over the dykes and polders of the Rhine River delta, including a focus on the “Room for the River” levee-setback pilot project at the Blauwe Kamer nature reserve.
The goal of comparing river science and management approaches in different parts of the world is to identify similarities and differences. The way that any one place manages its water and rivers is not an instantaneous and optimized solution, but rather it is a legacy of decades or even centuries of past policies and approaches. California has it’s own “water model” (https://californiawaterblog.com/2021/08/01/the-california-water-model-resilience-through-failure-2/), as do most regions. Some elements of these models have been locally optimized, but other elements are artifacts of “path dependence” – like “qwerty” keyboards – just accidents of past technologies or historical choices. Students in the 2025 ASI/Delft summer school carefully analyzed parallel river systems, including the Yuba and Noce, looking for similarities despite contrasting conditions and differences despite similar conditions.
In summary, we share and amplify NSF’s goal of engaging top students in international research. The result was our third cadre of students trained to look beyond national borders “to overcome traditional and nationalistic paradigms” and find the innovative solutions addressing water-resource challenges in California, across the US, and around the world. UC Davis and its World Water initiative continue to work to institutionalize this global approach.
Further Reading/Viewing
Pinter, N., Lund, J. R., & Moyle, P. B. (2019). The California water model: Resilience through failure. Hydrological Processes, 33(12), 1775–1779. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.13447
Pinter, N., J. Brasington, A. Gurnell, G.M. Kondolf, K. Tockner, G. Wharton, and S.M. Yarnell. (2019). River research and applications across borders. River Research and Applications, 35: 768–775.
Sharp, P.A., & Leshner, A.I. (2014). Meeting global challenges [Editorial]. Science, 343(6171), 579. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250725.
https://worldwater.ucdavis.edu
About the Authors
Nicholas Pinter is the Roy J. Shlemon Professor of Applied Geosciences and Associate Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California Davis. Prof. Pinter and his students study earth-surface processes, including coastal geomorphology and geodynamics as well as river systems, flood risk management, and adaptation to climate-driven changes. Prof. Pinter leads the World Water at UC Davis initiative, including convening NSF-funded Advanced Studies Institutes (with Sarah and other colleagues) in Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands and providing educational programs in flood and drought management and the study of freshwater ecosystems.
Sarah Yarnell is a Research Hydrologist at the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. Her research focuses on integrating the traditional fields of hydrology, ecology and geomorphology in the riverine environment. Currently her group is conducting research that applies understanding of river ecosystem processes to managed systems in the Sierra Nevada and downstream rivers, with a focus on the development and maintenance of riverine habitat. Throughout her time at CWS, she has co-taught field-based river courses, such as Ecogeomorphology (with Nicholas and colleagues), and she teaches as a part-time lecturer for the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. She is a member of the Hydrologic Sciences Graduate Group and finds working with students to be one of the highlights of her job.
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