The Schmitt Lab for River System Science and Sustainability (RS3) is seeking a postdoctoral scholar to lead the development of a globally applicable framework for studying sediment connectivity in rivers. The framework will be designed to evaluate human alterations of riverine sediment fluxes and sediment transport between sources and sinks since 1950.
RS3 is part of the Schmidt Sciences Virtual Institute on Earth’s Water (VIEW), an ambitious consortium aiming to advance global understanding of human pressures on freshwater ecosystems. The successful candidate will join a rapidly growing lab and lead part of RS3’s contribution to the DARE project—the Digital Atlas of Riverine Ecosystem Services—which is one of the research projects within the VIEW consortium.
As the global need for water has intensified over recent decades, rivers have been extensively altered by water abstractions and infrastructure. One critical but often overlooked aspect of these alterations is their impact on sediment supply and riverine sediment fluxes, with cascading downstream consequences for river morphology, ecosystems, and water users.
The successful candidate will spearhead the development of novel modeling approaches to estimate terrestrial sediment supply to rivers and track riverine sediment fluxes between sources and sinks at continental to global scales. The work will have two main research components.
First, the candidate will develop a globally applicable river-network sediment-routing model, building on frameworks such as CASCADE (Schmitt et al., 2016) or the Network Sediment Transporter (Czuba, 2018), or developing new approaches where appropriate. This work will also involve integrating the sediment-routing framework with hydrologic models developed by project partners.
Second, the candidate will develop approaches to estimate terrestrial sediment supply to rivers, including sediment volumes and grain-size distributions, drawing on existing methods or developing novel ones as appropriate. These tools will be used to reconstruct how sediment production and delivery to river networks have changed since 1950 in response to human activities such as deforestation.
The successful candidate will be expected to take intellectual ownership of the research and work across the full research pipeline, from developing research questions and formulating hypotheses to designing analyses, testing hypotheses, and leading resulting publications. We are particularly interested in candidates eager to collaborate closely with partners in the DARE project and the broader VIEW consortium.
The postdoctoral scholar will be recruited through the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
