Professor Bruce L. Rhoads
Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science
Department of Geology (Affiliate)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (Affiliate)
Depart of Natural Resources and Environmental Science (Affiliate)
My research focuses on rivers and watersheds as important natural resources and natural features of Earth’s physical landscape. I primarily look at how rivers change through time via mechanisms of erosion and deposition and how, at watershed scales, the delivery, transport, and storage of sediment results in changes in river processes. We live in a world increasing affected by humans - through changes in land use and climate - and I am particularly interested in how humans influence the dynamics of rivers and watersheds and how these effects link to the environmental quality of water resources, including biogeochemical and ecological conditions. My work also attempts to bridge physical and human geography by looking at how fluvial processes, i.e. the physical processes associated with rivers, are connected to social, political, and economic processes. Much of my research is conducted in the Midwest, both in urban and rural environments and on small streams and large rivers. My work is field oriented, but often includes GIS, laboratory, and modeling components.
Tanya Shukla
Tanya is a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in the Rivers, Watershed, and Landscape Dynamics program in the Geography and GIS department. She studies how a river's physical structure evolves in response to changing external controls (including flow regime and sediment supply) and instream controls (stream power, channel geometry), and assesses the environmental implications of such changes. She obtained her Masters degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar in 2018, working on reach-scale sediment dynamics using sediment budgeting to provide a geomorphological approach to sustainable sediment mining and hydrological modeling using physically-based models. She has worked as a research assistant for the Critical Zone Observatory in Intensively Managed Landscapes and is currently working as a research assistant for the Critical Interface Network in Intensively Managed Landscapes (CINet). For her dissertation research she is examining the dynamics of anabranching rivers.
Chelsy Salas
Chelsy is 1st-year Ph.D. student in the Rivers, Watershed, and Landscape Dynamics program in the Geography and GIS department. She has an undergraduate degree in Geology from the University of Nevada and an Master's Degree in Environmental Science and Geospatial Analysis from California State University Los Angeles. She is currently is working on a project analyzing the recovery of sinuosity in meandering streams in intensively managed agricultural landscapes that have been artificially straightened.
Sadia Sabrina
Sadia finished her Master's program in Fall 2020 in the Rivers, Watershed, and Landscape Dynamics program in the Geography and GIS department. She received her Bachelors degree from the Asian University for Women in Environmental Science with a minor in Mathematics. Her thesis research examined time-varying flow structure at river confluences.
Past Group Members