Research
How human activity and a changing climate reshape the transport and connectivity of water, sediment, and nutrients across Earth's surface.
Dynamic connectivity is how water, sediment, and nutrients move across a landscape via linkages that shift over time — and the role people play in modulating those connections. It is at this intersection of hydrology, water quality, and data science that my group operates. We combine deep learning, environmental sensors, geochemical tracers, and numerical models to understand how watersheds function — and how that function is being reshaped by urbanization, deforestation, agriculturalization, and climate change, from individual catchments to the continental scale.
Research Areas
Select an area to read more and see selected work from the group.
Machine Learning
Deep learning and interpretable ML for streamflow, sediment, and nutrient prediction at basin-to-continental scales, and benchmarking these models against process-based understanding.
Selected work
Environmental Sensing
Deploying and mining networks of in-situ nitrate, conductivity, and turbidity sensors to resolve storm-event and seasonal water quality dynamics that grab samples miss.
Selected work
- U.S. rivers are transporting more suspended sediment, often in less time
- Revealing nitrate uptake and dispersion dynamics using high-frequency sensors and two-dimensional modeling in a large river system
- Nitrate hysteresis as a tool for revealing storm-event dynamics and improving water quality model performance
Sediment Tracing
Sediment fingerprinting with fallout radionuclides and geochemical tracers, hysteresis analysis, and reservoir sedimentation assessment to target conservation practices.
Selected work
- Event-driven shifts in river and reservoir sediment sources: Cottonwood River and John Redmond Reservoir, USA
- An index for inferring dominant transport pathways of solutes and sediment: assessing land use change with high-frequency conductivity and turbidity sensor data
- Plutonium isotopes: an effective tool for fluvial sediment sourcing in urbanized catchments
Urban Impacts
Tracing the sources and drivers of salt, sediment, and nutrient pollution in urbanizing and drinking-water-supply watersheds, and the social-ecological-technological systems behind it.
Selected work
Current & Recent Funding
More than $11M in awarded research funding as PI and Co-PI since 2019, supported primarily by the National Science Foundation.
-
CAREER: Dynamic Connectivity
A research and educational frontier for sustainable environmental management under climate and land use uncertainty. National Science Foundation, 2024–2029.
-
GCR: Freshwater Salinization
Common Pool Resource Theory as a scalable framework for catalyzing stakeholder-driven solutions to the Freshwater Salinization Syndrome. National Science Foundation, 2023–2027.
-
Reservoir Sustainability
Can human-induced turbidity currents enable sustainability of freshwater reservoirs? National Science Foundation, 2023–2026.
-
Broad Run Watershed Monitoring Program
Long-term water quality and sediment monitoring program in Loudoun County, Virginia. Loudoun Water, 2025–2027.
-
Statewide Reservoir Sedimentation Inventory
A statewide inventory of dominant reservoir sedimentation sources to inform targeted watershed conservation. Kansas Water Office, 2024–2026.