Data Isn’t Enough: Community Knowledge, Visualization, and the Challenges of Science Communication, 2026
Video
Data Isn’t Enough Transcript (PDF)
About the Program
When: June 3, 2026, 11 am MDT / 1 pm EDT
Presented as part of Wright-Ingraham Institute’s 2026 Webinar Series – Practicing Integration: Interdisciplinary Research & Integrative Studies in Action
Environmental data has never been more abundant, yet science consistently fails to produce necessary action. Communities facing drought, wildfire, and ecological change struggle to connect satellite imagery, sensor networks, and real-time dashboards to their own decisions and realities.
The gap isn’t purely technical. Rather, it’s a problem of epistemology, narrative, and trust. The challenge is to find ways to convert complex scientific findings into something communities can understand, evaluate, and act on.
The session featured Kimberly Fewless, a scientist at NSF’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Matthew Ross, faculty director of the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University.
In this insightful conversation, Kimberly shared her work building convergence research frameworks across the upper Colorado River Basin, where getting water managers, federal agencies, and climate scientists into genuine dialogue has proven to be a communication challenge far more than a technical one. She reflected on the slow, trust-dependent work of making complex climate data sets actionable for the people who actually need them.
Matt shared his lab’s approach to stakeholder-driven science including the real-time water quality forecasting tools co-designed with water treatment plant operators in Fort Collins and Greeley, Colorado. He made the case that modeling is secondary when decision-makers can’t trust or interpret the output, and that building bridges between scientist and practitioners is of utmost importance. The gap between data and action, both speakers suggested, isn’t technical. Rather, it’s a problem of trust, narrative, and relationship, but that gap can be slowly by acting locally, through sustained collaboration.
About the Speakers
Kim Fewless is a Scientist III in the NSF NCAR Research Applications Lab, the current UCAR President’s Leadership Fellow, and a doctoral candidate at Colorado State University. Kim brings a background in Civil and Environmental Engineering, water resources, liberal arts, and interdisciplinary research to support NSF NCAR’s applied water and climate research, particularly within her roles in the Environmental Resilience Applications Program and the Convergence Science Program. She enjoys utilizing systems perspectives, integrating knowledge across disciplines and institutions, and building capacity for collaboration to advance sustainability, resilience, and well-being across the Earth system.
Matt Ross is Faculty Director of the Geospatial Centroid at the Colorado State University. Born in Colorado, Matt attended CU-Boulder where he studied Ecology and French. After a brief stint as a teacher and translator in France, Matt attended grad school at Duke University where he studied watershed biogeochemistry, and the impacts of mining on water quality. He returned to Colorado at Colorado State University, where he has built a lab that uses data science techniques to understand freshwater change and to use that understanding to drive water resource decision making.
Header image: Matt Ross / ROSS Syndicate (Landsat)