Hydrological systems are important to society as water resources and effective management requires an understanding of how water and humans influence each other. To describe human-water connections it is necessary to bridge social and natural sciences. To this end, we construct an interdisciplinary graphical framework for evaluating potential human-water system resilience, which is a tool to show the spatial and temporal response to system change of both human and natural systems. This helps to identify the ways that human responses to change relate to changing water resources and identifies important thresholds and potential disconnects that would create vulnerability. We further use this tool to describe a dynamic, coupled human-water system present in the arid Sierra de la Giganta region of Baja California Sur, Mexico. In this remote mountain range, there is a community (self-identifying as Choyeros) who rely on spring water for ranching and subsistence. Using mixed methods of hydrogeochemistry and anthropology, we describe spatial connectivity and temporal changes of both hydrologic and social systems. We use these observations to examine the Choyero response to system changes and explore the topology of the various approaches that the community employs to adapt to changing water availability. The framework guides dialogue to constrain the types of policies, strategies, and responses that help to promote the sustainability of water resources. This framework can be used to compare systems across spatio-temporal scales to produce more generalizable and communicable insights of coupled human-natural systems.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01101-6.
Keywords: Cultural anthropology; Hydrology; Resilience; Rural societies; Sustainability; Water management.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2022.