Dr. Wendy Graham, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering - Hydrologic Processes

Wendy Graham is the Carl S. Swisher Eminent Scholar in Water Resources in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida and Director of the University of Florida Water Institute. She conducts research in the areas of integrated hydrologic and water quality modeling; groundwater resources evaluation and remediation; evaluation of impacts of agricultural production on surface and groundwater quality; evaluation of impacts of climate variability and climate change on water resources; stochastic modeling and data assimilation. More information can be found at www.abe.ufl.edu/graham

Goals of the Hydrologic Processes component – The routing and flux of water dictates types and rates of physical, chemical and biological processes affecting transport and transformation of nutrients in watersheds. The goal of this facet of the program is to understand the local-scale couplings and feedbacks among climate, land-use, water use, and nutrient cycling in watersheds, and how these relationships scale-up to affect nutrient fluxes to springs, lakes, wetlands and estuaries. Potential research questions include:

(1) How do climatic, geologic and anthropogenic drivers (land use and water use) determine the fluxes and flowpaths of water from the land to receiving waters (springs, rivers, lakes, estuaries)?
(2) What are the sources of nutrients to the mobile water phase and how do climate, soils, geology, landscape position and land cover influence them?
(3) What are the sinks of N and P from the mobile water phase and how do soils, geology, landscape position and land cover influence them?
(4) How can new process knowledge gained by answering questions 1 though 3 above be most efficiently incorporated into integrated hydrologic-water quality models and used to improve the development of socially-acceptable, ecologically-protective nutrient management strategies at the watershed scale.