Science

Water quantity and quality are critical to the sustainability of the environment in which we all live. No longer are the nation's rivers considered to be just a pipe that leads to the oceans, but rather a valuable part of the world we live in. Our driving motivation is to improve the water quality within our inland waters, and to provide an understanding of how external forcings alter our water resources. Our group examines the fate and transport of solutes (both anthropogenic and natural - e.g. metals, nutrients) within lotic systems over a range of temporal and spatial scales - from the pore scale to entire river basins, from minutes to years. Our work focuses on areas of high hydrologic retention and sharp redox gradients which are indicative of high biogeochemical transformation rates. The work is interdisciplinary in nature, and we actively work with geologists, hydrologists, stream and landscape ecologists, aquatic chemists, environmental engineers, atmospheric scientists, and environmental economists. Fundamental questions that are addressed include:

How will water quality change in response to a changing hydrologic cycle?

How strong is the landscape - stream connection? How will this vary in response to a changing climate?

How do riparian zones interact with the stream network?

How do surface - subsurface interactions alter downstream solute transport?

How can we scale processes occurring at the pore scale to basin-scale material fate and transport?

What are the dominant biogeochemical processes that results in material alteration? What controls the rates of these processes?

What temporal variation exists in downstream solute transport - diurnal, seasonal, annual?