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Aridification in the U.S. Southwest has led to tension about conservation and land management strategy. Strain on multi-generational agricultural livelihoods and nearly 150-year-old Colorado River water adjudication necessitates solutions from transdisciplinary partnerships. In this study, farmers and ranchers in a small San Juan River headwater community of southwestern Colorado engaged in a participatory, convergent research study prioritizing local objectives and policy. Acknowledging the historic and sometimes perceived role of academic institutions as representing urban interests, our goal was to highlight how research can support rural governance. This process involved creating community partnerships, analyzing data, and supporting results distribution to the surveyed population through social media. The survey was designed to support a local waterway management plan. Survey results showed lack of water availability and climate changes were selected by producers as most negatively affecting their operations, and many were extremely interested in agroforestry methods and drought-resistant crop species. Statistical analysis identified that satisfaction with community resources was positively correlated with scale of production, satisfaction with irrigation equipment, and familiarity with water rights. We hope to contribute our framework of a convergent, place-based research design for wider applications in other regions to uncover solutions to resource challenges. 

Water productivity (or efficiency) data inform water policy, zoning, and planning, along with water allocation decisions under water scarcity pressure. This paper demonstrates that different water productivity metrics lead to different conclusions about who is using water more effectively. In addition to supporting the population's drinking and sanitation needs, water generates many other public and private social, environmental, and economic values. For the group of municipalities comprising the Phoenix metropolitan area, we compare several water productivity metrics by calculating the water value intensity (WVI) of potable water delivered by the municipality to its residential and non-residential customers. Core cities with more industrial water uses are less productive by the conventional efficiency measure of water used per capita, but core cities generate more tax revenues, business revenues, and payroll per unit of water delivered, achieving a higher water productivity by these measures. We argue that policymakers should consider a more diverse set of socio-economic water productivity measures to ensure that a broader set of values are represented in water allocation policies. 

This paper describes the dataset associated with the paper “Product-Specific Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) in US Counties” (Paudel et al., 2023). This dataset comprises human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) values for 3101 counties in the conterminous US for the years 1997, 2002, 2007, and 2012. For this dataset, HANPP is the carbon content of specific crop, timber, and livestock grazing products appropriated by humans in a county in a year. To calculate HANPP, raw agricultural data were downloaded from public databases such as USDA-National Agricultural Statistics Service Quick Stats and Cropland Data Layer, US Forest Service Timber Product Output, and NPP data from MODIS. These data were processed in Microsoft Excel using stoichiometry derived from established scientific literature. HANPP was partitioned by year, county, product, used and unused and above- and below-ground. This complete dataset is published in Mendeley Data and the methods used to compile them are included to make our research well documented, reproducible, and useful for future studies.