Characterizing Fluid Flow Pathways from Plot to Landscape Scale

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Subsurface fluid flow pathways are crucial to critical zone structure and function, but are quickly evolving due to environmental changes, including climate, land use, or regulatory changes. Despite their importance, gaps in identifying, quantifying, and understanding hydraulic pathways and fluxes remain. The goal of my research program is to understand how fluid flow pathways and fluxes from the local to regional scale are evolving due to environmental changes. The short term goals of this research program will result in new methods to evaluate both the evolving fluid flow pathways in temperate and cold regions and the processes that drive them at multiple scales. This will improve our understanding of how environmental change is affecting hydraulic pathways, providing new methods for identifying fluid flow pathways, while training four PhD, three MSc, and five BSc students. Through experiments and surveys, we will examine the interactions of bromine and organic matter using stable bromine and chlorine isotopes, to evaluate evolving fluid flow pathways in cold regions and temperate regions. Evolving fluid flow pathways in cold regions will also be investigated using barometric response functions. A framework will be developed to target, obtain, and evaluate data from large publicly accessible databases to identify and evaluate how changing environmental conditions are affecting fluid flow pathways in temperate regions. Results from this research program will advance our ability to characterize and understand the shifting hydraulic pathways resulting from environmental change. This knowledge will help provide the data necessary to improve water availability outcomes resulting from land use, climate, and regulatory changes. HQP, trained as hydrogeologists and biogeochemists, will improve professional skills, scientific literacy and communication, and will be prepared to contribute in a wide variety of geoscience careers.