Admin Husic
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Rivers carry more than water. Rain and runoff wash soil, sediment and nutrients such as nitrate off farms, cities and streets and into streams, rivers and reservoirs.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
hydrology
water quality
hydrologic connectivity
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Quantify how strongly landscapes connect to rivers over time and space by training a deep learning model on high-frequency nitrate and turbidity sensor data from more than 150 U.S. rivers.
- Use explainable machine learning, which reveals which inputs drive predictions, and a mathematical description of dynamic connectivity to link changing land attributes to river water quality.
- Develop and evaluate a web application that lets water managers use dynamic connectivity as a practical tool for managing nutrient and sediment loading.
- Determine how turbidity currents created by water-injection dredging travel through a Kansas reservoir, using high-frequency turbidity sensing and computational fluid dynamics modeling.
- Measure how the dredging test changes reservoir water quality, including temperature layering and oxygen-related chemistry, using in-place sensors and lab experiments before, during and after the test.
- Assess downstream channel and floodplain sediment buildup and the responses of fish and macroinvertebrate (aquatic insect and invertebrate) communities to released sediment.
More about the research
Changes in land use and climate are speeding this up, which pollutes waterways and slowly fills reservoirs with mud. That mud shrinks the water they can store for drinking, farming, flood control and hydropower. The research asks how landscapes deliver water, sediment and nutrients to rivers, how people have changed that delivery, and how it can be managed better. One project works across the whole United States with sensor networks and machine learning. The other is a field study of a new way to flush sediment out of a reservoir.
Why it matters
Reservoirs supply drinking water, irrigation, flood control and hydropower, and few new dam sites remain in the United States. If water-injection dredging proves effective with little harm downstream, it could extend reservoir lifetimes and cut dredging costs worldwide. Nationwide maps of how farms, cities and stormwater deliver nitrate and sediment to rivers, along with a practitioner web tool, could help water managers target pollution sources and plan for land use and climate change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Dynamic connectivity: a research and educational frontier for sustainable environmental management under climate and land use uncertainty
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2029
Collaborative Research: Can Human-Induced Turbidity Currents Enable Sustainability of Freshwater Reservoirs?
NSF · Oct 2024 – Sep 2027
Closest labs
Enrica Viparelli
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how sedimentation rates and grain sizes vary across the Congaree National Park floodplain after the Hurricane Helene flood, using field sediment sampling.
Emily Seelen
University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop river-erosion forecasting tools for Alaskan permafrost rivers using satellite imagery analyzed with sub-pixel and machine-learning change detection, combined with theory on permafrost erosion and mud transport.
Jonathan Czuba
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether fine sediment accumulation in streambeds can be predicted from bankfull flow conditions across a wide range of U.S. landscapes, by analyzing a U.S. EPA stream dataset.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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