Matthew LaFevor
University of Alabama, AL·Earth & Environmental Science
In mountain regions, people increasingly reshape hillsides to catch and hold rainwater: terraces, ponds, trenches and check dams built to store freshwater for farms, cities, industry and ecosystems. These water-harvesting earthworks are spreading across both public and private land, including ecologically sensitive protected areas, yet surprisingly little is known about what they actually do to water movement or whether they deliver the benefits promised.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Social Science
- Topics
water harvesting
earthworks
terracing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Quantify the spatial distribution and design characteristics of existing water-harvesting earthworks in highland mountain areas using field surveys, mapping and remote sensing analysis.
- Characterize precipitation-runoff and infiltration dynamics in earthwork-affected catchments through field site monitoring, experiments, and soil and hydrologic characterization.
- Build spatially distributed hydrologic models to estimate how different earthwork types affect water movement across diverse environmental conditions.
- Assess how far earthwork construction drives land-cover change in highland regions and which stakeholder groups benefit, synthesizing findings into data products and reports for earthwork managers.
More about the research
This project measures their effectiveness.
Why it matters
Water-harvesting earthworks are being built at scale to secure freshwater supplies in mountain regions, often without evidence that they achieve their goals. Quantifying their effects on runoff and infiltration, and identifying which groups benefit, could give land managers and protected-area agencies a basis for siting and designing projects, and help avoid construction that alters sensitive highland landscapes without delivering water-conservation gains.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jacqueline Gerson
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify long-term trends in streamwater concentrations of 60 trace and ultratrace elements in boreal streams from 1985 to 2023, across decades and across nested catchments.
Stefano Galelli
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize the structural uncertainty that comes from choosing one dam operation model over another, using a computational framework applied to 18 large river basins spanning every major U.S. hydrologic region and about 200 dams.
Catalina Segura
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Determine how burning of vegetation alone versus vegetation and soil changes snow accumulation, snowmelt, streamflow and underground water storage in burned Willamette National Forest watersheds, using snow surveys, geophysics and soil infiltration tests.
The school
University of Alabama: 22 labs on PI Pages, $221M a year on research, 235 research doctorates a year.
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