Although only about 0.006% of the freshwater on the Earth is found in rivers, they are one of the major agents sculpting the Earth's surface. Rivers play a vital role in the Earth's geomorphological, hydrological, and biological processes. They provide habitat for aquatic plant and animal species and ecosystem services to humans ranging from freshwater to fertile land to carbon sequestration. Operating like a conveyor belt, rivers and their landscapes serve as biogeochemical couplers of landscapes and Earth-system components including continents, oceans, and atmosphere. They also pose hazards to lives and property. Fluvial landscapes are among the most densely populated, the most fertile, and the most threatened landscapes in the world. And yet, at the same time, they are among most frequently ignored ones within water and land management schemes.

 

In the Fluvial Landscape Dynamics (FLUD) Lab, we seek to advance process understanding of how river landscapes evolve and how this evolution interacts with environmental change across spatial and temporal scales.

 

How do diverse fluvial geomorphic forms arise in river landscapes, why do they vary over space and time, and what do they tell us about governing processes?

 

How are these fluvial geomorphic forms and processes influenced by human activities, climatic changes, and their cumulative effects?

 

The answers to these questions matter greatly in the planning of successful management and preservation of rivers and river ecosystems and in the development of land-use planning strategies including policies for the reduction of hazards associated with bank erosion, channel migration, and flooding.

 

FLUD is a multidisciplinary research lab that collaborate with researchers from a range of disciplines including geography, civil and environmental engineering, geology, and ecology. Research activities of the FLUD Lab are founded on a methodological framework that combines numerical modeling, Geospatial technologies (e.g., Geographic Information Science (GIS), Remote Sensing), spatial statistics, and field-based approaches.

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