Invited Speaker

The truth is in the stream: hydrologic hypotheses for designing field studies and interpreting their results

Sarah Rogers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:50:00 +0000

The truth is in the stream: hydrologic hypotheses for designing field studies and interpreting their results Sarah Rogers Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:50 Diane McKnight

Advances in hydrology are greatly needed and approaches that employ hypotheses to guide research have the potential to contribute to future advances. One line of reasoning in the USGS research program where I started my career was to “never undervalue forward progress on a tough problem”, and in this context, hypotheses can be particularly useful and empowering. Hypotheses can serve a range of purposes. Retrospective hypotheses that attempt to explain unexpected field observations or experimental results can provide a guide for designing further field studies. Focused testable hypotheses can facilitate effective presentation of proposed research, and clarify alternative hypotheses. Overarching hypotheses can provide a common integrating framework for collaborative research and can be revised as research progresses over time. Finally, the value of employing a hypothesis-based approach depends upon the research environment, which can act as an ‘‘environmental filter’’ in determining successful research outcomes.

Keynote Speaker
Diane McKnight

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Mountain lake responses to global change

Sarah Rogers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:36:00 +0000

Mountain lake responses to global change Sarah Rogers Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:36 Isabella Oleksy

Mountain lakes are among the most sensitive ecosystems on Earth, acting as early indicators of environmental shifts driven by global change. This research explores how mountain lake ecosystems are responding to the compounded effects of climate warming, altered hydrology, and atmospheric nutrient deposition. This research across high-elevation watersheds in the western United States, presents compelling evidence of how global stressors are reshaping the structure and function of these aquatic environments. This work reveals that rising temperatures, reductions in snowpack, and increases in nitrogen deposition are driving ecological shifts, including changes in primary production, algal community composition, and nutrient cycling. These processes have implications for biodiversity, food web dynamics, and carbon sequestration. Through a combination of long-term monitoring, high-frequency sensor data, and experimental manipulations, critical thresholds and feedbacks that may accelerate ecological change in mountain lakes have been identified. This research highlights how remote mountain systems, often perceived as pristine or buffered from anthropogenic influence, are in fact highly vulnerable to global pressures. By integrating limnological, biogeochemical, and landscape-scale approaches, this work clearly emphasizes the urgency of understanding and mitigating the cascading impacts of global change on fragile freshwater ecosystems.

Isabella Oleksy
Invited Speaker

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Infrastructure focused on Interstitial Spaces: How AI assisted workflows accelerate integrated water science

Sarah Rogers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:34:00 +0000

Infrastructure focused on Interstitial Spaces: How AI assisted workflows accelerate integrated water science Sarah Rogers Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:34 Suzanne Pierce

Communities across the United States face diverse water resource challenges requiring both rapid decision-making for urgent events and strategic long-term planning for chronic issues. Engineers and scientists rely on sophisticated models and simulations to understand these complexities; however, their outputs often remain inaccessible or impractical for real-world planning and decision-making processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly proving valuable in enhancing decision-making across numerous fields. While machine learning algorithms and large language models dominate public discourse, other AI research domains offer significant potential to bridge the gap between advanced simulations and practical applications. Human-AI partnerships are particularly effective for addressing complex problems that exceed human reasoning capacity alone.

The AI-enabled Modeling Flagship project (AIM) exemplifies a human-centered approach, designing tools that fit decision-making workflows. The AIM project uses semantic AI to create recommender systems that suggest viable solutions backed by trustworthy data and bridges cross-disciplinary models and data with reusable tools and provenance tracking. Applications span hydrological models from coastal surge to flood engineering, and from drought response to subsidence impacts. To support the broad range of hydrological science and planning needs, our research team is linking cloud spaces with traditional supercomputing at scale, even as we customize problem framing interfaces that support instantiation of bespoke scenarios for multiple user audiences. Every advance leverages AI under the covers of our applications which is pivotal for developing intelligent decision support applications that enable researchers and communities to effectively respond to extreme events, protect vulnerable populations, and manage valuable natural resources. The integration of advanced AI with scientific data and action-oriented contexts will be a key area to watch in the coming years. Most importantly, finding AI-approaches that accelerate the spaces “in between” common scientific or analytical tasks can accelerate research to results.

Keynote Speaker
Suzanne Pierce

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Urban Water Planning at Denver Water and Building a Research Portfolio at a Water Utility

Sarah Rogers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:22:00 +0000

Urban Water Planning at Denver Water and Building a Research Portfolio at a Water Utility Sarah Rogers Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:22 Katie Spahr

Theoretically, holistic management of urban water systems leads to better water quality and quantity outcomes and makes the most of a shared resource. In practice, managing the urban water cycle requires navigating complex governance structures and working with different entities that have competing drivers to identify and implement multi-benefit projects. In this talk, I will discuss some of the complexities related to urban water management in Denver and identify some opportunities for research and innovation. In addition, I will provide some insights into the opportunities for research administration and collaboration working in the water utility space in Colorado and nationally.

Katie Spahr
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Microplastics in the coastal ocean: the interplay between particle properties and flows

Sarah Rogers — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:21:00 +0000

Microplastics in the coastal ocean: the interplay between particle properties and flows Sarah Rogers Tue, 04/01/2025 - 12:21 Laura Sunberg

Microplastics are a growing problem in the oceans. Understanding where microplastics are carried by ocean flows is crucial to learning their fate and impacts. The transport of microplastics is complicated by their physical properties (e.g., shape, size, and density), which can change over time as microplastics biofoul (i.e., facilitate the growth of organisms adhering to their surfaces). In this talk, I will discuss two projects which explore the interplay between microplastic properties and transport by coastal flows. First, I will share experiments on the dispersion of microplastics of different shapes and sizes in a wave-current flow. Then, I will discuss numerical simulations on the interplay between biofouling and the regional scale coastal transport of microplastics. Despite their different physical scales, both of these projects highlight the complex interplay between particle properties and their transport by environmental flows.

Laura Sunberg
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