Today Checo Colon-Gaud brought his SIUC advanced stream ecology class to LRRD for a lab. Checo (holding before and after signs) is an NSF-funded postdoc famously featured in our Em2 video.
I talked about our work and urban stream restoration. Then the students moved to an Emriver Em2 model, first doing exercises to understand slope and long profile surveys and then a "habitat restoration" project with as-built and post-first-flood long profile surveys.
All their stone structures failed, but the lesson was well learned--you have to carefully build a constructed channel or the stream will rebuild it for you.
On the big montor Lily Hwang is real-time plotting the long profile survey data.
Here you can see the somewhat dished, way too steep, and very spikey "as built" long profile was smoothed and adjusted after a few minutes of flow.
I really enjoyed meeting this class--a very sharp and, as you can tell, fun loving group. It's wonderful to see students using our models, learning and having a great time.
Wish I could do this every day.Labels: education, em2, geomorphology, graduate, lily hwang, profile, siuc, undergraduate, video