New paper alert! Cuyahoga Valley National Park is pock-marked by reclaimed surface mines, but the park can’t get trees to grow on these sites to achieve true restoration. In this paper, we investigate what’s up with the soil physical and hydrologic properties and how a deep-ripping process might help the …
The Watershed Lab in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont seeks a graduate student to work on a fully-funded project on microplastics in Lake Champlain, beginning in June 2024. Lake Champlain is an 1100 km2 lake between Vermont and New York, and this …
We are respectful and supportive of each person’s identities, experiences, and needs. We work hard, but we also take adequate time to take care of our physical and mental health and to enjoy our lives outside of work. We practice safe habits in the field, in the lab, and in …
The following is an email that I sent today to graduate students in my department. I am sharing it here in the spirit of broadening the conversation beyond just our department. I follow in the footsteps of Dr. Julie Libarkin and Dr. Jacquelyn Gill who have shared personal letters and …
Legendary fluvial geomorphologist Reds Wolman once said “Floods come from too much water,” and that’s the phenomenon distilled to its core essence. But this bit of wisdom doesn’t give us much to go on if we want to understand what creates floods or why some areas are more flood-prone than …
As you watched the videos about flow generation mechanisms, one of the things that you should have noticed is that climate and landscape characteristics influence the way water gets to streams. (And the way water gets to streams influences the shape of the hydrograph.) Putting it together Below I go …
[Watershed Hydrology students: You should read the whole thing, but if you want to see the TL;DR version first, scroll way down.] The big picture Now that you’ve learned all about the four different ways to generate streamflow, you might be asking yourself why they matter. Here’s why it matters: …
Infiltration is the act of water moving from the land surface into the soil. Usually, we think about infiltration occurring in response to rainfall, where water is applied over the whole land surface. In that case, infiltration is important because it’s one of the deciding factors in how much rainfall …
Hydraulic conductivity is the term used to describe how easily a fluid moves through a porous medium. In the case of water infiltrating into soils, the fluid is the water and the porous medium is the soil. We often use K to represent hydraulic conductivity when we are writing equations. …
In Watershed Hydrology, we’ve been talking about soil moisture and water potential in relation to evaporation and infiltration. An important concept is the idea of the unsaturated zone, where the pores (or open spaces) in the soil, sediment or rock are not completely filled with water most of the time. …