Each watershed will feature different ecological and social issues and be a baseline for future studies and replication. Water is emerging as an important variable for sustaining an ecosystem and for enabling long-term human use of that ecosystem. Watersheds are dynamic and characterized by high levels of both biodiversity and human use, especially for agriculture, energy, transportation, and industry.
Water also binds together the natural and social sciences.
As a commodity, water firmly resides in the realm of both policy and economics. A separate website will house all scientific data sets, thus making biological, chemical, hydrological, social, and economic data for a single watershed available in one place and accessible via the Internet. They are joined by prominent program partners such as World Resources Institute, the Stockholm Environment Institute, and the International Food Policy Research Institute. These small grants have been used by their recipients to leverage greater funding and expanded participation in important international environmental studies. The AAAS Atlas of Population and the Environment , produced by EHN and published by the University of California Press, provides an important analysis of the relationships between human population and the environment using text, maps, and graphics.