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Worldwide water usage has increased six times since the 1900s. That's twice the rate of human population growth. According to the United Nations, nearly half the world's population will experience critical water shortages by the year 2025.
The Nature Conservancy began the Great Rivers Partnership to help protect freshwater resources, transforming the way large river systems are preserved and protected. Now IBM has joined the effort, providing high performance super-computing for three-dimensional visualization of these crucial natural resources.
What impact will construction of a new dam have on the water supply of a town downstream? Will clear-cutting a forest in the upper part of a river's watershed imperil the fish stocks local people depend on for food?
Addressing these questions will help government organizations set policy and management decisions to help conserve the natural environment and benefit residents at the same time. The project will initially focus on three large river systems: the Mississippi River basin in the United States, Brazil's Paraguay-Paraná River system and China's Yangtze River.
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The Mississippi
The remarkable diversity of plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles and mammals depending on the freshwater habitats found in the river system includes a fourth of the continent's fish species. The same region is home to more than 30 million people, half of whom rely on the Mississippi River and tributaries as sources of drinking water. Levees, dams and changes in how land is used have altered this life-giving process of ebb-and-flow. As a result, biological diversity, water quality, productive forests and other critical habitats are declining.
Fast facts:
- Part of the largest river system in North America.
- A raindrop falling in the headwaters of Lake Itasca, Minnesota, would arrive at the Gulf of Mexico in about 90 days.
- By the year 2000, more than 50 percent of the wetlands in the contiguous United States had been drained or filled.
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From wildlife to transport to agriculture, much is dependent on the world's river systems. And small changes can have catastrophic effects. For example, in the summer of 1993, flooding in the Upper Mississippi River Basin caused between 12 and 16 billion dollars worth of damage.
To anticipate these impacts, government and environmental organizations create intricate scientific models. Traditionally these models are no more than complex spreadsheets, using data the scientists either collect or have access to. And each organization uses its own methodology, recreating what many other organizations have done or plan to do.
IBM is working with its partners to help scientists bring together their models and develop a decision support system for scientists that facilitates integrated water management and improves collaboration and communication between key stakeholders within a given river basin. The system will be a fully immersive, three dimensional space, or metaverse.

The world's rivers are going 3D. Real-world data can help model a river basin, transforming it into a digital metaverse.

A researcher can place her avatar into the metaverse, exploring potential changes such as soil erosion, fish populations and water levels.

Researchers can even move inland, measuring the environmental impact from agriculture, construction and transportation projects.
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