Urban Geomorphology and Water Quality – Dr. Anne Jefferson's Watershed Lab

Ongoing Work

Much of our current work on fluvial geomorphology focuses on the distribution and effects of anthropogenic debris and plastics in urban streams. Read more about that here.

As part of the STORMS project, we are collecting and analyzing turbidity, specific conductance, and dissolved oxygen data in urban streams in Cleveland and Denver. MS student Andrew Blinn (working with Dave Costello) is using the data to understand the effects of high flow/turbidity events on ecosystem metabolism. You can read more about the STORMS project here and here.

Recent Projects

Two trees are fallen down crossing the stream. A man stands in the streambed and looks at the camera.

Large wood in a small urban stream with graduate student Garrett Blauch for scale.

If a tree falls in an urban stream, will it stick around? MS student Garrett Blauch investigated the abundance, mobility, and geomorphic effects of large wood in urban streams in northeastern Ohio. His work showed that wood abundance decreases – and mobility increases – as a function of urbanization intensity. The high mobility and relative paucity of wood means that it exerts only limited influence on the geomorphology of urban streams.

Blauch, G., and Jefferson, A.. 2019. If a tree falls in an urban stream, does it stick around? Mobility, characteristics, and geomorphic influence of large wood in urban streams in northeastern Ohio, USA. Geomorphology. 337: 1-14, doi: 10.1016/j.geomorph.2019.03.033

In many urban hydrology and water quality studies, the percent of the landscape covered by impervious surfaces is the key variable used to explain differences across sites, in part because it is easy to extract from widely available datasets. But watersheds with the same impervious cover can have very different land cover configurations, and we hypothesize that those may lead to heterogenous hydrologic and water quality responses. Graduate student Mary Plauche examined water quality variability in three urbanized headwater stream networks in Summit County, Ohio, focusing on the spatial and temporal variability of chloride and nitrate in these systems with similar impervious cover. She also used nitrate and water isotopes to assess how sources of water and nitrate change during storm events. Publications have been delayed by covid, but stay tuned!