This talk will discuss human activities on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon National Park, with a focus on the history and politics of white-water river running. The speaker will discuss the challenges faced by the National Park Service as it seeks to manage, both responsively and responsively, this important natural resource. How a mathematician came to play a part in these efforts will round out the presentation.
The speaker will describe her work on the development of the Grand Canyon River Trip Simulator. In this computer model, various quantitative approaches have been used to represent human- environment interactions in a dispersed outdoor recreation context. This intelligent agent-based spacio-temporal computer simulation system is now being used by the National Park Service as a management tool. The simulation informs the Park as to the likely impact of various alternative management scenarios for rafting trips on the Colorado River.