ABE’s Rio Bonham specializes in hydrological modeling; if you asked him to give an elevator pitch of his work he might say something along the lines of, ‘I use computers to predict where water is going to be’. However, inarguably, the most special feature of his work involves a uniquely human element.
Bonham, a second year Ph.D. Student under the direction of Drs. Medeiros and Muñoz-Carpena, participates in a research project in collaboration with the Blackfeet Nation, Amskapi Pikuni, in northern Montana. His project, initially funded by the UF ROSF (Research Opportunity Seed Fund) combines Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the landscape into quantitative flash flood models, exploring an intersection between Western science and engineering with Indigenous knowledge systems. To accomplish his goal of providing a robust and useful model of the patterns and predictions of flooding on the Blackfeet Nation, Rio relies not only on computer models and artificial intelligence (AI), but the rich storytelling history of the Blackfeet people. His approach addresses aspects that computer models typically miss, like impacts on people and their values related to a problem.
“There are people who’ve been living on the landscape for thousands of years and they understand the landscape better than we ever will. They know how the systems respond to extreme weather events and how different indicators show that things are changing over time. So my research is all about, why don’t we go talk to them and learn from them what should go into our models?” he muses.
The Blackfeet reservation in Northern Montana neighbors Glacier National Park and spans an impressive 1.5 million acres of forestland, prairie and 180 bodies of water. The traditional homeland of the Blackfeet covers a much larger expanse north to the Saskatchewan River in Canada to the Yellowstone River to the south. For over 10,000 years its people have lived on and in natural order with the land marked by the ridge of the Rocky Mountains, nicknamed ‘the backbone of the world’.
“Water is life” has become a familiar protest cry for one of our most vital resources. In the Blackfeet Nation that sentiment resonates. Water plays a particularly special spiritual significance to the Tribe, as well as imbuing financial and environmental importance. Not only is this the water that they need to drink to sustain the lives of their people, but water plays a crucial role in their tourism and agriculture industries. Water carries a lot of weight.
With one foot in modeling and data entry, and the other in observation and empirical knowledge, Rio’s work in hydrological modeling combined with the long held tribal history and stories is about creating an AI tool to help the Blackfeet community plan how to prepare for flash flooding events.
“We do hydrological modeling because we want to understand where water is going to be at, at any given point. Understanding where water is going to be is so important. If there’s too much water, in the event of flooding, we need to be able to predict what the magnitude of that flood is going to be. Is this something that’s going to just come over the banks, or is it going to take out the whole town? On the other side of that is droughts, too. If we have all these different indicators pointing towards that it might be a drought one year, we can help people be prepared for that, maybe that looks like buying up more hay for the cattle. Maybe that looks like managing the dams a little bit differently and redistributing the water allocations. You can start to make adjustments. When you talk about resiliency of communities, part of that is just allowing people to be prepared, making sure that they have the best information available so that they can plan ahead,” Rio explains.
Tools like satellite imagery, remote sensing and machine learning can organize data, produce historical info and make predictions about weather and water events, but in places described as ‘data scarce’, including traditional understanding of the landscape is proving to be a vital key to understanding ecological patterns and projecting with some confidence the future of water behavior in times of climate uncertainty. However, given the importance and significance of water to the Blackfeet, you need the right person for the job.
Rio is soft spoken and earnest and his drive for this research is palpable. There is something about his openness, humble nature, and propensity towards a ‘beginner’s mindset’ that makes him a seemingly perfect candidate to undertake this task with careful consideration, this interdisciplinary balance of engineering and social science.
“The Pikuni Tribe has been super welcoming to just invite me in to come alongside them in their work, especially as I’m not a native researcher. That relationship is only growing. This work is a kind of marriage of physical historical data, word of mouth, and legacy history with some hardware and software. Traditional Ecological Knowledge refers to a relational understanding of the landscape, and Indigenous populations already have that. It’s typically held in the format of things like oral histories, stories. That information is so valuable and so rich, especially when it stays on the landscape, because it is specific to that landscape. That’s a big reason that we’re working with the Blackfeet, because they’ve been living on their land for thousands of years. Their creation stories are from there. It’s the history of their land and their understanding of what their grandfathers and those grandfathers knew and passed down. It’s not just an abstract bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet, it’s real,” he says about the privilege of working with the Blackfeet community, “I’m not an expert just because I come from, you know, our one university, right? They have a thorough understanding of their landscape.”
After a long battle for the rights to their own water, the “Blackfeet Water Compact,” was established between the tribe and the Federal Government which allows them to manage their water resources more effectively. The Blackfeet Nation and the Blackfeet Water Department now partner with engineers to strategize access of drinking water, irrigation, and sustainability. Their work with infrastructure and planning are key, which lends a particular relevance to ABE’s and Bonham’s work.
What if this particular approach to hydrological modeling could be a template for solving similar issues? In a longer lens, could a multi disciplinary modeling project be applied to different situations?
“The framework developed with the Blackfeet Nation in Montana could be applied anywhere. Future researchers could come along and say, okay, this is what they did. Here’s where I see a need in this particular community. Here’s what it looks like to come alongside. Here’s the computer tools that we need. Hopefully that can be applied to things like fire ecology, wildlife, anywhere that you have language that holds information,” Rio asserts.
-Story by: Samantha Jones 3/24/25
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