Environmental Sciences Commons^™

Historical Channel Change Caused By A Century Of Flow Alteration On Sixth Water Creek And Diamond Fork River, Ut, Jabari C. Jones

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Changes in the amount of water and sediment that enter a river can change its shape and size. The way that rivers change is affected by a variety of factors, including the size of the sediment in the river, and past changes to the river. The Diamond Fork River in central Utah has been altered by water delivered from the Colorado River system for over a century. Beginning in 1915, water used for irrigation was delivered through a tributary, Sixth Water Creek, with daily summer flows that were much larger than natural flows. This caused drastic change to the rivers, …

Groundwater Hydrogeolgy And Hydrochemistry Of Karst Springs In The Eastern Peninsula Of Fort Hood Military Installation, William Scribner Welles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The eastern peninsula of Fort Hood Military Installation is underlain by a complex karst spring network. These springs are a primary water source in a protected habitat for endangered songbirds, which has only recently begun to be fully investigated. These Fredericksburg Group springs express both epigenetic and hypogenetic karst signatures. The study area is part of a paleo reef trend, a hydraulically disconnected segment of the northern section of the Edwards Aquifer. This study utilized standard ion index values, repeated measures, and principal component analyses on the chemical profiles of six perennial springs to classify spring water sources and their …

Ncer Assistance Agreement Annual Progress Report For Grant #83582401 - Assessment Of Stormwater Harvesting Via Manage Aquifer Recharge (Mar) To Develop New Water Supplies In The Arid West: The Salt Lake Valley Example, Ryan Dupont, Joan E. Mclean, Richard C. Peralta, Sarah E. Null, Douglas B. Jackson-Smith

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The goals of the original proposed project remain the same, that is, to test the hypothesis that Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) for stormwater harvesting is a technically feasible, socially and environmentally acceptable, economically viable, and legally feasible option for developing new water supplies for arid Western urban ecosystems experiencing increasing population, and climate change pressures on existing water resources. The project is being carried out via three distinct but integrated components that include: 1) Monitoring of existing distributed MAR harvesting schemes involving a growing number of demonstration Green Infrastructure (GI) test sites; 2) Integrated stormwater/vadose zone/groundwater/ ecosystem services modeling; and …

Column Tests Of Nitrate Breakthrough Behavior In Subsurface Sediments To Understand Transport In The Root-Zone, Rebecca Sally Haworth, Emma Rose Goodwin

Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences

Nitrate has become an increasingly ubiquitous pollutant in surface and groundwater, posing a threat to hu- man health and ecosystems. Nitrogen is a necessary nutrient for plant growth and is limiting in many soils. As a result, farmers often add nitrogen to soil in a usable form such as nitrate, nitrite, or ammonia through the addition of fertilizer.

Investigating Mechanisms Of Hydraulic Conductivity Transience In Sandy Streambeds, Wilhelm Fraundorfer

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Streambed hydraulic conductivity (K) is known to be spatially and temporally heterogeneous, but few attempts to understand the controls on temporal variability have been made. This study documents temporal K transience and demonstrates how hydraulic, geophysical, and sedimentological methods can be combined to understand the processes that give rise to changes in streambed K. Falling head permeameter tests and slug tests were conducted to determine vertical K (K_v) and K (slug test K), respectively. These tests were repeated three times over a twelve-week period on the same grid at a depth of 0.5 …

Grain Size Analysis Of Massie’S Creek Near Flax Pond And Community Park, Andrew R. Rivera

The Research and Scholarship Symposium (2013-2019)

The goal of this research is to better understand the stream bed conditions at the confluence of North Fork and South Fork Massie’s Creek next to Community Park in downtown Cedarville, OH. Stream depth as well as sediment type where determined as a result of field work done for this project. The depth data was then used to create a contour map of the pool behind the low-head dam that defines the lower boundary of the confluence area. Sediment distribution is represented on this map based on laboratory particle size analysis and gross piratical size analysis done in the field. …

Climate Change Impacts On Hydrological Processes In Silver Bow Creek Watershed, William Howard George

Graduate Theses & Non-Theses

Climate change is expected to alter temperature and precipitation regimes across the globe and have varying effects on localized hydrological processes. For Silver Bow Creek (SBC), a headwater to the Clark Fork River in western Montana, the magnitude, duration, and frequency of spring runoff and summer base flow are dependent on the processes of snow accumulation and melt. Headwater hydrology and mountain streams will likely experience earlier snowmelt, increased spring flows, and decreased summer flows due to climate change.

A process-based hydrological model the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to evaluate the effects of climate change on …

Bioassessment Of A Drinking Water Reservoir Using Plankton: High Throughput Sequencing Vs. Traditional Morphological Method, Wanli Gao, Zhaojin Chen, Yuying Li, Yangdong Pan, Jingya Zhu, Shijun Guo, Lanqun Hu, Jin Huang

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Drinking water safety is increasingly perceived as one of the top global environmental issues. Plankton has been commonly used as a bioindicator for water quality in lakes and reservoirs. Recently, DNA sequencing technology has been applied to bioassessment. In this study, we compared the effectiveness of the 16S and 18S rRNA high throughput sequencing method (HTS) and the traditional optical microscopy method (TOM) in the bioassessment of drinking water quality. Five stations reflecting different habitats and hydrological conditions in Danjiangkou Reservoir, one of the largest drinking water reservoirs in Asia, were sampled May 2016. Non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis showed …

The Effects Of Fire On Snow Accumulation, Snowmelt And Ground Thaw On A Peat Plateau In Subarctic Canada, Elyse Mathieu

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During the past century, the highest rates of warming have occurred at latitudes above 60^oN, where air temperatures have risen at twice the rate of other regions. In northwestern Canada, this warming has coincided with an increase in the frequency, size and severity of wildfires. The influence of such fires on the trajectory of on-going permafrost thaw is not well understood. As a consequence, the combined impacts of climate warming induced permafrost thaw and possible feedbacks arising from wildfires cannot be properly assessed. This study examines the impact of a 2.7 ha low-severity wildfire (July 2014) on water …

An Inter-Watershed Comparison Study Of Bedrock Controls On Shallow Subsurface Flow And Streamflow Response, Robert Livesay

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Bedrock controls on watershed response have been actively studied in recent years, however, most conclusions are based on surface water analysis leaving unresolved questions about the nature of bedrock flow paths and ultimately their control on watershed response. In this study, we investigated bedrock controls on watershed response by simultaneously monitoring the hydrology of two adjacent watersheds underlain by dissimilar geologic formations (monzonite vs. meta-sandstone) and by characterizing subsurface conditions through bedrock drilling and fracture mapping. We hypothesized, when soils saturate, the underlying bedrock geology may influence the partitioning of shallow subsurface flow (SSF) between soil and bedrock flow paths, …

Permafrost Thaw-Induced Forest To Wetland Conversion: Potential Impacts On Snowmelt And Basin Runoff In Northwestern Canada, Emily Haughton

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In the discontinuous permafrost zone of northwestern Canada, snow covers the ground surface for over half the year, thus snowmelt constitutes a primary source of ecosystem moisture supply and strongly influences stream hydrographs. The peat landscapes along the southern limit of discontinuous permafrost are dominated by forested permafrost plateaus (“forest”), and treeless, permafrost-free wetlands (“wetland”). Permafrost-thaw induced transformation of this landscape has changed water flow and storage processes and therefore introduced new uncertainties on the region’s water futures. Here, I a) characterize forest and wetland water storage and flow from snowmelt, and b) evaluate how permafrost thaw-induced wetland expansion at …