What is the purpose of CWACES?
The purpose of the Center for Water as a Complex Environmental System (CWACES) is to promote and facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship on water in the natural environment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through core missions of research, teaching and outreach. A distinguishing characteristic of the Center is its emphasis on the need to effectively couple research in the natural and social sciences to achieve understanding of complex water-related environmental systems and to develop predictive tools for sustainable management of these systems. The Center does not directly address technological issues of water treatment and purification, which are effectively dealt with by the WaterCAMPWS at UIUC. Instead, CWACES complements the WaterCAMPWS by focusing on water as a component of complex environmental systems, encompassing basic scientific aspects of these systems as well as human interaction with, and attempts to manage, these systems. CWACES also complements water-
