Location
USU Eccles Conference Center
Event Website
http://water.usu.edu
Start Date
4-5-2016 5:06 PM
End Date
4-5-2016 5:09 PM
Description
The Bear River Fellows program is a unique learning experience for undergraduate students giving hands-on experience in collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing environmental and ecological data. The Bear River is an important resource that provides water to farms, reservoirs, wetlands, wildlife, and hydropower generation. Because of the river’s value, it is important to understand how the Bear River channel moves and how that affects the surrounding landscape, which is a topic of interest for local land owners but especially conservationists in protecting wetlands and river ecology. We collected hydrological, topologic, and vegetative data from three persisting research sites along an 8 mile stretch of the Bear River, two along the river main stem between Idaho-Utah state line and Cutler reservoir with the first at the Bear River Bottoms near Morton and the second is just below the confluence of the Bear and the Cub Rivers, a major tributary, and a site on the Cub River In the study of these sites, we developed water level, river bank surveys, riparian zones delineation, and river bed contours using an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and transom surveying equipment. We used the data to develop multi-year cross sectional views of each research site providing a graphical view of the river cross section. Data that was collected by previous fellows in 2012 and 2013 was added to the cross section picture to observe how the river has changing over the past several years. The results of this multi-year view shows how the river has shifted and erosion on riparian zone around the river. The erosion is clearly visible on steep banks, at the Morton study site six feet of erosion took place laterally on steep bank. This shift of the river and its flow is useful to understand the river’s ecology, the impact that small changed to the river have on wildlife, and assist local land owners and conservationists in maintaining the Bear River and its wetlands.
Included in
Earth Sciences Commons, Environmental Engineering Commons, Environmental Sciences Commons, Hydraulic Engineering Commons, Life Sciences Commons
Channel Movement, Error Analysis, and Impacts for Neighboring Landowners: A Lower Bear River, UT Case Study
USU Eccles Conference Center
The Bear River Fellows program is a unique learning experience for undergraduate students giving hands-on experience in collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing environmental and ecological data. The Bear River is an important resource that provides water to farms, reservoirs, wetlands, wildlife, and hydropower generation. Because of the river’s value, it is important to understand how the Bear River channel moves and how that affects the surrounding landscape, which is a topic of interest for local land owners but especially conservationists in protecting wetlands and river ecology. We collected hydrological, topologic, and vegetative data from three persisting research sites along an 8 mile stretch of the Bear River, two along the river main stem between Idaho-Utah state line and Cutler reservoir with the first at the Bear River Bottoms near Morton and the second is just below the confluence of the Bear and the Cub Rivers, a major tributary, and a site on the Cub River In the study of these sites, we developed water level, river bank surveys, riparian zones delineation, and river bed contours using an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and transom surveying equipment. We used the data to develop multi-year cross sectional views of each research site providing a graphical view of the river cross section. Data that was collected by previous fellows in 2012 and 2013 was added to the cross section picture to observe how the river has changing over the past several years. The results of this multi-year view shows how the river has shifted and erosion on riparian zone around the river. The erosion is clearly visible on steep banks, at the Morton study site six feet of erosion took place laterally on steep bank. This shift of the river and its flow is useful to understand the river’s ecology, the impact that small changed to the river have on wildlife, and assist local land owners and conservationists in maintaining the Bear River and its wetlands.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/runoff/2016/2016Posters/13
Comments
A poster by Russell Babb, who is with Bear River Fellows Research Program, Water and Environmental Engineering