Approaching the Nexus: An integrated approach for stakeholder engagement in Food, Energy, and Water Systems in Idaho's Magic Valley

Complex adaptive system management is key to biological and socio-economic integrity within landscapes. Drivers of landscape ecology, population growth, climate change, and economic pressures necessitate a profound understanding of both the processes and future conditions of the landscape. The determination and interconnection of these assumptions for change demand organization through an integrated approach to model existing conditions, future processes, and solutions to address issues within Food, Energy and Water Systems (FEWS). Stakeholder input requires various tools and strategies to develop effective and useful results; however, specific challenges and limitations of participatory research arise throughout the process. Some key issues include: 1) engagement of stakeholders for analysis of key issues in the landscape and identification of drivers of change; 2) development and maintenance of stakeholder trust through revisions, and alignment of comprehensive stakeholder inputs for revision. This study uses an integrated approach to investigate effective means of stakeholder engagement for a National Science Foundation-funded (INFEWS) waste solutions project in the Magic Valley, Idaho, USA. These key issues in stakeholder engagement require a framework to represent anticipatory trajectories of change driven by the stakeholder's understandings of the system. Our integrated approach, which attempts to balance agent-based modeling and geospatial modeling, is as follows: 1) assessment of the current conditions and process driven by an agent-based model; 2) modeling of autonomous processes and stakeholder driven assumptions for the present and future landscape; 3) refinement of models driven by stakeholder input; 4) selection of indicators of landscape change; 5) development of solutions providing support for issues within the landscape. This study describes the development of the integrated approach to engage stakeholders for Food, Energy, and Water Systems (FEWS) solutions in the Magic Valley, Idaho.