Event Details

Speaker:  Zac McEachran, PhD Candidate, Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota

Changes in forest cover and climate are expected to shift water cycling along key ecosystem boundaries, such as the northwoods of northern Minnesota. Disproportional winter warming could change spring flooding in particular. Additionally, changes in land cover may interact with climate change to affect flooding in unknown ways. However, many studies on the effects of forest cover change on flooding occur in very different regions with mountainous terrain and bedrock close to the soil surface, in contrast to the glaciated upland-wetland systems found in Minnesota and broadly along the boreal-temperate transition zone. In this talk, we will explore how hydrologists have investigated and disentangled climate versus land use effects on flooding, engaging with ongoing work at long-term experimental watersheds and how the state of our knowledge of the forest-flood relationship has changed through the years. This includes discussing ongoing work to develop a new approach to flood analysis using data from watershed experiments at the Marcell Experimental Forest in north-central Minnesota.

Zac McEachran is a PhD candidate in forest hydrology at the University of Minnesota, where his work uses the pulse of streamflow to diagnose the health of the watersheds they drain. With an undergraduate degree in physics and MS in forest hydrology, his approach relies on tracing the fundamental process drivers of streamflow through numerical watershed modeling.

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