DRI's Dr. Jennifer Duan is a psychic of sorts. But she's not using a crystal ball or tarot cards to peer into the future; she's using science. Relying on mathematical models, Duan helps determine the most effective ways to manage and restore waterways needed for agriculture, wildlife, and recreation.
It's obvious from observing the landscape around waterways that floods and other natural processes can alter the course of a stream or river. When these alternations become a problem, a manager must decide the best way to return a waterway to something close to its original state. Duan's research helps take out the guesswork. She explains, "Using a mathematical model, a computational approach, we can simulate natural processes like bank erosion, channel erosion and migration, deposition, or sediment transport and predict the response of the stream to proposed restoration work."
Duan is currently applying her model to Ward Creek, a small tributary of the Feather River near Quincy, California. Ward Creek is agriculturally important to the area, but it has had serious erosion problems since heavy flooding in 1997. To restore the stream's stability, managers have proposed putting a check dam upstream to raise the water level and prevent further erosion of the banks. Thanks to Duan's model, they've discovered that while the check dam will help the situation upstream, it will worsen the erosion downstream. Plans are now being made to create curving channels downstream to offset those effects.
Once Duan has completed her work at Ward Creek, she plans to apply her model to the much larger Indian Creek in the same area. "Ward Creek has been a good demonstration of how the mathematical model can meet their needs," says Duan. She also plans to continue refining and improving her models, particularly her groundbreaking work on meandering channel processes-one of the most complicated and, therefore, difficult to simulate processes in this field of research.
A native of China, Duan was educated at universities there and then earned her Ph.D. in Computational Hydroscience and Engineering from the University of Mississippi. She's been with DRI since January 1999; and even without her computer models, she foresees a wealth of potential research projects in the future. Among the areas she hopes to investigate are watershed modeling, water quality modeling, and the interaction between surface and groundwater systems.
Jackie Allen
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