David Steward, chair of the NDSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Walter B. Booth Distinguished Professor, has been honored by the OpenMI Association for his work using the Open Modelling Interface standard.

Steward and a team of researchers were recognized for their paper “Conserving the Ogallala Aquifer in southwestern Kansas: from the wells to people, a holistic coupled natural–human model,” which studied the collective impacts of groundwater depletion in one of the world's most important regions for agricultural production.

“We’re trying to understand the capacity of groundwater to mediate water stress, and these computational tools with interdisciplinary science and engineering are helping us discover what contributes towards resiliency in agricultural and human systems,” said Steward.

The research was funded by a National Science Foundation grant, NSF-CNH-0909515, with additional funding from the Ogallala Aquifer Project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

The annual OpenMI Awards recognize excellence in the use and development of the Open Modelling Interface, a standard for the runtime exchange of data between software components for environmental management. Up to three awards are given each year.

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