Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Distinguished Lecture Series is a program to provide free lectures through the AGU College of Fellows to connect AGU Honorees with general geosciences audiences. Ellen is a lecturer for the 2026/2027 academic year. Her talk is titled “Messy Rivers are Healthy Rivers: The Role of Spatial Heterogeneity in Sustaining River Ecosystems.” Fill out this form to request Ellen as a lecturer.

Congratulations to our three newly minted masters of geosciences!

Itai was awarded research funding for his MS from AAG. Congratulations!

Lindsey’s poster on nutrients associated with floodplain logjams was one of the best presentations in the Warner College. Congrats Lindsey!

Graduate students in the fluvial lab spent much of their summer collecting data in the field. After finally wrapping up our last scheduled fieldwork this week, we’ve been reflecting on the many rivers we saw, measured, and experienced.

Itai spent most of this summer conducting geomorphologic and hydrologic monitoring on a stream restoration site in the Kawuneeche Valley, on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park. He also attempted to quantify the residence time and permeability of a beaver pond at the CSU Mountain Campus and a couple of restoration structures in the Kawuneeche Valley to test some methods for his master’s thesis. 

Katie “Leadfoot” Larkin spent the summer field-mapping networks of first- and second-order tributaries of Neota Creek, Jacks Gulch, and Little Beaver Creek. Make no mistake about it, this is a task that requires sharp eyes and STRONG legs! This fall, she’ll be comparing my field mappings to several remote-mapped channel network estimations in order to evaluate the accuracy of the channel initiation proxies embedded into these remote methods. 

Shayla spent time traveling to various side quests and fieldwork. After learning about landscape evolution modeling, international freshwater ecosystem management, she finally made it back to Montana and Colorado for data collection. Her local fieldwork aimed to understand the relationships between bed configuration and wood in high- versus low-gradient environments. Because this work is closely related to aquatic habitat quality, Shayla spent some moments in-between measurements trying to spot bull trout hanging out beneath logjams.

Lindsey got up close and personal with some floodplain logjams. She collected plant surveys and over 100 lbs of soil for nutrient testing.

Dr. Katherine Lininger is coming from CU Boulder to give a department seminar on September 18th.

Dr. Francis Rengers is coming to give a department seminar on October 23rd.

Connor Mertz presented his thesis titled “Restoration prioritization of Upper Colorado Tributaries in the Kawuneeche Valley, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO”

Katie Larkin presented her thesis titled “Determining primary drivers or river bead functionality in mountain headwaters streams”

Shayla Triantafillou was awarded the 2025 Warner College of Natural Resources Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award. She was recognized for this award at the Natural Resources Days Reception.

David Sear visited from the University of Southampton, UK, and gave a seminar: What does process-based restoration mean in groundwater-dominated low-energy river systems with 6000 years of human history?

David encouraged members of our lab to see as many different rivers as possible, so in the spirit of his advice we took him for a tour of a mountain river in the Southern Rockies.

Read about Owen Richardson in this story from Dartmouth about his recent publication in Hydrological Processes!