MSRA Webinar Series - Hyporheic Process Restoration In Urban Streams feat. Katherine Lynch, Paul Bakke, Mike (Rocky) Hrachovec, Ed Kolodziej, and Skuyler Herzog
MSRA is excited to continue our series of webinars featuring leading industry researchers and partners, as we strive to offer opportunities for discussion and promote advancement of the stream restoration science. Visit our website and social media channels for upcoming webinars. Continuing Education Credits will be offered for these events. We hope you will join us:
When: Tuesday December 13, 2022
Time: 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Where: GoToWebinar
Following your registration, and prior to the event, you will receive a webinar link from GoToWebinar which will give you access to the webinar.
Will you be attending?
Register Today! Registration will close at 5pm on Monday December 12.
EVENT DETAILS:
Cost: Free for members, $10 for non-members
Presenter Bio:
Katherine Lynch is an Aquatic Ecologist with Seattle Public Utilities (Surface Drainage), specializing in urban creek restoration for over 20 years. She works on floodplain reconnection projects as a component of Seattle’s green infrastructure, participating in all stages from planning, through design, construction and performance monitoring, the latter in collaboration with regional researchers.
Paul Bakke has 30 years’ experience as a hydrologist and geomorphologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service. During this time, he developed expertise in how rivers create and maintain their morphology, how they transport sediment, and how surface water interacts with subsurface water to create the hyporheic zone. After leaving government service, he started The Science of Rivers, a company devoted to creating educational resources in river science and consulting in stream restoration and assessment techniques. His dream is to help create a world in which rivers are better understood, better appreciated, and allowed to sustain themselves through healthy natural processes.
Mike (Rocky) Hrachovec, P.E. specializes in the design and construction supervision of river, stream and wetland restoration projects. He has designed projects with construction values to $15 million including dam removal, river engineering, floodplain creation, hyporheic restoration, instream habitat enhancement, and fish passage barrier removal.
Ed Kolodziej is a Professor at the University of Washington with joint faculty appointments at Environmental Sciences at UW-Tacoma and in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW-Seattle. He also is a Principal Investigator at the Center for Urban Waters (Tacoma, WA) where Ed and his research group use advanced mass spectrometry and hard work to investigate contaminant fate and transport, build effective treatment systems, and insure ecosystem health.
Skuyler Herzog is an Assistant Professor of Natural Resources at Oregon State University-Cascades in Bend, OR. Skuyler is a hydrologist specializing in groundwater-surface water interactions, especially hyporheic zone restoration. Like the water quality problems he studies, Skuyler’s research does not fit neatly into traditional management sectors. Instead, his projects span agricultural (feasibility of floodplain reconnection along Upper Crooked River, OR), urban (hyporheic restoration in Seattle, WA), wastewater-dominated (fate and transport of metformin in hyporheic zones, Germany), and forested streams (catchment hydrology in HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, OR). Skuyler works with water practitioners, stakeholders, and regulators to translate scientific results into practical management solutions.
Presentation Abstract:
Like most cities Seattle faces challenges managing stormwater to reduce flooding and property damage while also protecting urban waterbodies. In urban streams throughout the West Coast, stormwater causes ongoing physical damage to stream channels and water quality degradation that impacts salmon. Green stormwater infrastructure and process-based stream restoration offer alternatives to conventional stormwater management and prioritize watershed connectivity. For example, floodplain reconnection is an effective way ofincreasing stream channel capacity to store and process runoff to reduce flooding and slow erosive peak flows. However, achieving process-based restoration that can improve and sustain aquatic habitat, particularly in an urban environment, is considerably more challenging. Stream restoration designs specifically tailored for restoration or enhancement of hyporheic processes can offer substantially greater ecological benefits than traditional habitat restoration approaches. Maximum benefits are expected in streams that cycle substantial portions of their surface water into the hyporheic zone, and which have diverse hyporheic pathways and residence times for subsurface water. We explore how the hyporheic structures can be customized to target different reactions or adapt to other contexts and provide a current example of the broad applicability for the hyporheic restoration approach (a project incorporating biomass and limestone for cleaning up acid mine drainage). However, these benefits are not achievable in all stream types. We will discuss how conceptual evaluation of site hyporheic potential based on geomorphic considerations is currently possible and the need for future research to develop quantitative metrics for hyporheic assessment.
Sign up now so you won’t miss it!
