Research

Themes in our research

Urbanization

The global urban population is expected to double in the next 30 years. Our goal is to understand how these dramatic changes will impact water quality.

Social Vulnerability

The populations most susceptible to flood hazards are also the most vulnerable. Our goal is to understand how climate and land use change will shift social vulnerability into the future.

Landscape Modeling

Human alteration of the natural landscape changes the sources, pathways, and residence of contaminants. We model these interactions and identify solutions.

Aquatic Sensing

Many aquatic processes occur over short time-scales that are not observable using traditional data. We employ high-frequency sensors to identify cycling and transport of nutrients in rivers.

Ecohydraulics across scales

Reach Scale

We investigate small-scale processes, like turbulence, contaminant dispersion, nutrient
uptake, and toxin production. We use instruments that can sense the community composition of algal mats (fluorometers) and the micro-fluctuations of velocity induced by turbulence (acoustic doppler velocimeters).

River Scale

We investigate the impact of land use change on sediment and nutrient dynamics. We use instruments like high-frequency aquatic sensors to give us important information about water quality at sub-minute resolution. We also use physically-based numerical models to simulate connectivity.

Region Scale

We investigate the drivers of structural and dynamic connectivity of water and contaminants across landscapes. These drivers include climatic, tectonic, and anthropogenic forcings and require high-performance computing. We also use global datasets of hydrologic extremes and benefits.

Current projects

High-frequency sensing of water, sediment, nutrients, and algae in a rapidly urbanizing environment

Urbanization drastically alters water quality across space and time.

We use in situ aquatic sensors to understand the transport of contaminants at novel timescales down to minutes and seconds. Our suite of sensor arrays includes measurement of turbidity, chlorophyll, nitrate, dissolved organic carbon, and other analytes. Our research findings highlight the impact of urbanization on increasing the connectivity of contaminants to stream corridors.