Water Quality and Management

Land use and water law

Relations between social distributions of power and wealth, economic growth, and natural resource qualities, and impacts of policy and organization on these relations, exploring how scientific and cultural concepts, the organization of knowledge, and scientific research, affect public discourse about and actions toward environmental problems, the impacts of institutional relations on the management of watersheds and river basins and the interplay between policies toward race and toward natural resources in the United States.

The research program in Vincent Resh's laboratory follows three lines: (1) studies of the evolutionary biology and ecology of aquatic insects, crustaceans, and molluscs in stream and river habitats; (2) the evaluation of habitat manipulations for use in environmental restoration or enhancement, and the use of them in examining underlying influences of ecological interactions; and (3) and the development of techniques for the biological assessment of water quality.

Zack Powell has worked on physical and biological processes in lakes, estuaries, and the ocean. All have been directed toward the question: How do physical processes, like mixing and turbulence, currents and circulation, or mass and energy transfer at the surface, affect the biological processes in planktonic ecosystems?

Professor Narasimhan is a hydrogeologist. Hydrogeology is concerned with geological processes that are influenced by water. Over the past three decades, Narasimhan and his students have addressed research issues and published papers on a wide variety of hydrogeological topics including, aquifer hydraulics, groundwater contamination, nuclear waste disposal, geothermal energy, irrigated agriculture, marine hydrogeology, petroleum reservoir engineering, triggered earthquakes, numerical modeling, and so on.

Dr. Liang's research interests include land-atmosphere interactions on regional and global climate and water resources; hydrologic impact of climate change; land surface modeling; surface water and groundwater interactions; data assimilation; applications of remote sensing; GIS-based modeling for non-point source pollution transport and its impacts on hydrologic and ecological systems at watershed scales; hydro-informatics; and hydrologic forecasts for gauged and ungauged watersheds.

Matt Kondolf's research and teaching focuses on rivers, their transformations by humans, their resilience and their active restoration

Watershed hydrology & geochemistry, geomorphology and earth surface processes, evolutionary ecology, and analysis of environmental data.

Alex Horne's research emphasizes quantification of environmental and ecological problems to define engineered solutions. Some of the problems tackled have been the in site measurement of toxic and biostimulatory effects of highly-treated wastewaters in estuaries, rivers, wetlands, lakes, reservoirs, and oceans. Effects of heavy metals, oil spills, chlorinated wastewaters, and selenium have been studied recently.

New sources of water, development of a quantitative measure of sustainability, water reuse, submerged membrane bioreactor performance and solids processing, biodegradation of estrogens in membrane bioreactors, evaluation of biostability of drinking water, and development of biofilm structure.