FORKS — “River Chemistry From Space,” an Evening Talk by Catherine Kuhn, is set from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. today.
The presentation will be in the Hemlock Forest Room at the Olympic Natural Resources Center, 1455 S. Forks Ave.
Admission is free. Refreshments will be served, and a potluck of desserts is encouraged.
Kuhn, a doctoral student in the School of Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, is researching the human transformation of large river systems and explores the intersection of water resources, biogeochemistry and environmental change.
She specializes in satellite remote analysis of inland waters and is pioneering new methods to test optical models for quantifying changes in river chemistry from space.
After spending half a decade teaching environmental science in urban public schools, Kuhn returned to graduate school, where she earned a master’s in environmental science from the Yale School of Forestry.
Rivers, lakes and streams are considered sentinels of environmental change, yet most research analyzing the impact of change occurs at the watershed scale, according to Kuhn.
While smaller-scale studies provide invaluable insight into physical processes, few studies describe the vulnerability of inland water quality to environmental change at larger scales, she said.
Both types of knowledge are crucial for informing policymaking, water resources management and conservation, she said, but few national scale studies exploring water quality exist.
Advances in cloud-based data analytics have created a new research landscape, making possible the rapid analysis of public datasets to monitor changes in surface waters at large spatial and temporal scales, she said.
Kuhn will explore some of these new tools for landscape analysis and share results from her research comparing satellite-retrieved estimates of water quality to field measurements for the Columbia River.
Evening Talks at ONRC is funded through the Rosmond Forestry Education Fund, an endowment that honors the contributions of Fred Rosmond and his family to forestry and the Forks community.
For more information, contact Frank Hanson at 360-374-4556 or fsh2@uw.edu.
