Our group uses a combination of field-based experiments, environmental observation, and numerical modeling to quantify couplings between physical, biological, and chemical systems, and apply this knowledge to predict water quantity, water quality, and ecosystem responses to changes in key drivers including land use change, land management activities, and climate change.
Ward studies the transport of nutrient, pollutants, energy, and water through landscapes, and the human and ecological consequences of their storage, fluxes, and transformations.
Keywords:
- transient storage, solute tracer, riparian, hydrology, hydrogeophysics, hyporheic, emerging contaminants, agro-ecosystem modeling, biogeochemistry, nitrogen cycle.
Research interests:
- Improving our understanding of dynamic exchange processes in the river corridor
- Advancing an interdisciplinary, systems approach to river corridor science
- Extending existing feature-scale knowledge to the river reach and network scale
- Improving our understanding of feedbacks between humans & the hydrologic cycle
- educational research.
Archive of Past Research Projects:
- Using a Drought-enhanced Nitrate Pulse to Understand Stream N Retention and Processing
- Iowa EPSCoR: Harnessing Energy Flows in the Biosphere to Build Sustainable Energy Systems
- Groundwater sustainability in agriculturally dominated watersheds: A case-study in Mewat District, Haryana, India.
- Predicting the transport and fate of emerging contaminants using multi-tracer characterization of reactive pathways.
- A comparison of hyporheic transport at a constructed stream restoration structure and natural riffle feature, West Branch Owego Creek, New York, USA
- Ecohydrology of the Ciha Fen.
- Quantifying bioswale performance in stormwater management
- Characterizing solute transport in coupled stream-hyporheic systems using electrical resistivity imaging.
- Techniques to Quantify Stream-Groundwater Exchange and Shallow Transport.
- Characterizing macropore flow in headwater streams.
- Design of restoration structures for hyporheic exchange.
- Aquifer Supply & Development.
My research program is motivated by four key advances that are required to significantly improve prediction of river corridor exchange and associated ecosystem services and functions:
- Improving our understanding of dynamic exchange processes in the river corridor;
- Advancing an interdisciplinary, systems approach to river corridor science;
- Extending existing feature-scale knowledge to the river reach and network scale; and
- Improving our understanding of feedbacks between humans and the hydrologic cycle
Research: Environment; Hydrology; Water
Research Area: Environmental Science
Area: Hydrology & Water Resources
