Jonathan A. Czuba

The change of nature and the nature of change in agricultural landscapes: Hydrologic regime shifts modulate ecological transitions

Hydrology in many agricultural landscapes around the world is changing in unprecedented ways due to the development of extensive surface and subsurface drainage systems that optimize productivity. This plumbing of the landscape alters water pathways, timings, and storage, creating new regimes of hydrologic response and driving a chain of environmental changes in sediment dynamics, nutrient cycling, and river ecology. In this work we non-parametrically quantify the nature of hydrologic change in the Minnesota River Basin, an intensively managed agricultural landscape, and study how this change might modulate ecological transitions. During the growing season when climate effects are shown to be minimal, daily streamflow hydrographs exhibit sharper rising limbs and stronger dependence on the previous-day precipitation. We also find a changed storage-discharge relationship and show that the artificial landscape connectivity has most drastically affected the rainfall-runoff relationship at intermediate quantiles. Considering the whole year, we show that the combined climate and land-use change effects reduce the inherent nonlinearity in the dynamics of daily streamflow, perhaps reflecting a more linearized engineered hydrologic system. Using a simplified dynamic interaction model that couples hydrology to river ecology, we demonstrate how the observed hydrologic change and/or the discharge-driven sediment generation dynamics may have modulated a regime shift in river ecology, namely extirpation of native mussel populations. We posit that such non-parametric analyses and reduced complexity modeling can provide more insight than highly parameterized models and can guide development of vulnerability assessments and integrated watershed management frameworks. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Dynamic connectivity in a fluvial network for identifying hotspots of geomorphic change

Dynamical processes occurring on the hierarchical branching structure of a river network tend to heterogeneously distribute fluxes on the network, often concentrating them into “clusters,” i.e., places of excess flux accumulation. Here, we put forward the hypothesis that places in the network predisposed (due to process dynamics and network topology) to accumulate excess sediment over a considerable river reach and over a considerable period of time reflect locations where a local imbalance in sediment flux may occur thereby highlighting a susceptibility to potential fluvial geomorphic change. We develop a dynamic connectivity framework which uses the river network structure and a simplified Lagrangian transport model to trace fluxes through the network and integrate emergent “clusters” through a cluster persistence index (CPI). The framework was applied to sand transport in the Greater Blue Earth River Network in the Minnesota River Basin. Three hotspots of fluvial geomorphic change were defined as locations where high rates of channel migration were observed and places of high CPI coincided with two of these hotspots of possibly sediment-driven change. The third hotspot was not identified by high CPI, but instead is believed to be a hotspot of streamflow-driven change based on additional information and the fact that high bed shear stress coincided with this hotspot. The proposed network-based dynamic connectivity framework has the potential to place dynamical processes occurring at small scales into a network context to understand how reach-scale changes cascade into network-scale effects, useful for informing the large-scale consequences of local management actions.

A network‐based framework for identifying potential synchronizations and amplifications of sediment delivery in river basins

Long-term prediction of environmental response to natural and anthropogenic disturbances in a basin becomes highly uncertain using physically based distributed models, particularly when transport time scales range from tens to thousands of years, such as for sediment. Yet, such predictions are needed as changes in one part of a basin now might adversely affect other parts of the basin in years to come. In this paper, we propose a simplified network-based predictive framework of sedimentological response in a basin, which incorporates network topology, channel characteristics, and transport-process dynamics to perform a nonlinear process-based scaling of the river-network width function to a time-response function. We develop the process-scaling formulation for transport of mud, sand, and gravel, using simplifying assumptions including neglecting long-term storage, and apply the methodology to the Minnesota River Basin. We identify a robust bimodal distribution of the sedimentological response for sand of the basin which we attribute to specific source areas, and identify a resonant frequency of sediment supply where the disturbance of one area followed by the disturbance of another area after a certain period of time, may result in amplification of the effects of sediment inputs which would be otherwise difficult to predict. We perform a sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the proposed formulation to model parameter uncertainty and use observations of suspended sediment at several stations in the basin to diagnose the model. The proposed framework has identified an important vulnerability of the Minnesota River Basin to spatial and temporal structuring of sediment delivery.

Comparison of fluvial suspended‐sediment concentrations and particle‐size distributions measured with in‐stream laser diffraction and in physical samples

Laser-diffraction technology, recently adapted for in-stream measurement of fluvial suspended-sediment concentrations (SSCs) and particle-size distributions (PSDs), was tested with a streamlined (SL), isokinetic version of the Laser In Situ Scattering and Transmissometry (LISST) for measuring volumetric SSCs and PSDs ranging from 1.8 to 415 μm in 32 log-spaced size classes. Measured SSCs and PSDs from the LISST-SL were compared to a suite of 22 data sets (262 samples in all) of concurrent suspended-sediment and streamflow measurements using a physical sampler and acoustic Doppler current profiler collected during 2010–2012 at 16 U.S. Geological Survey streamflow-gaging stations in Illinois and Washington (basin areas: 38–69,264 km2). An unrealistically low computed effective density (mass SSC/volumetric SSC) of 1.24 g/mL (95% confidence interval: 1.05–1.45 g/mL) provided the best-fit value (R2 = 0.95; RMSE = 143 mg/L) for converting volumetric SSC to mass SSC for over two orders of magnitude of SSC (12–2,170 mg/L; covering a substantial range of SSC that can be measured by the LISST-SL) despite being substantially lower than the sediment particle density of 2.67 g/mL (range: 2.56–2.87 g/mL, 23 samples). The PSDs measured by the LISST-SL were in good agreement with those derived from physical samples over the LISST-SLs measureable size range. Technical and operational limitations of the LISST-SL are provided to facilitate the collection of more accurate data in the future. Additionally, the spatial and temporal variability of SSC and PSD measured by the LISST-SL is briefly described to motivate its potential for advancing our understanding of suspended-sediment transport by rivers.

Coupling freshwater mussel ecology and river dynamics using a simplified dynamic interaction model

Freshwater faunal diversity and abundance have declined dramatically worldwide, concurrent with changes in streamflow and sediment loads in rivers. Cumulative effects and interdependencies of chronic covarying environmental stressors can obscure causal linkages that may be controlling the population dynamics of longer-lived freshwater fauna, such as mussels. To understand changes in long-term mussel population density, we developed a dynamic, process-based interaction model that couples streamflow, suspended sediment, phytoplankton, and mussel abundance under the hypothesis that chronic exposure to increased suspended sediment and food limitation are the primary factors controlling native mussel population density in a midwestern USA agricultural river basin. We calibrated and validated the model with extensive survey data from multiple time periods and used it to evaluate changes in mussel abundance at a subbasin scale over decades. We evaluated sensitivity of simulated mussel densities across a range of mortality rates and initial population densities. In scenarios representing altered sediment concentrations, such as might occur with climate or landuse-induced changes in streamflow or sediment generation rates, mussel population density showed critical threshold responses to long-term changes in suspended sediment concentration. This model of mussel population density can be used to test hypotheses about limiting factors, identify priority locations for restoration activities, and evaluate the effects of climate- or landuse-change scenarios.

Contextualizing Wetlands Within a River Network to Assess Nitrate Removal and Inform Watershed Management

This research was funded by NSF grant EAR-1209402 under the Water Sustainability and Climate Program (WSC): REACH (REsilience under Accelerated CHange)

Modeling bed-material sediment transport on a river network

Understanding how river-channel processes aggregate at the watershed scale is becoming increasingly important for watershed managers. Here we describe a network-based framework for modeling sediment transport in a watershed that involves (1) decomposing the landscape into a connected network of elements including river channels, lakes, etc., (2) spatially and temporally distributing inputs of sediment according to a sediment budget, and (3) tracking these inputs through individual landscape elements via process-based time delays. The resulting bed-material sediment transport model described herein includes recurrent inputs informed by a sediment budget and also lake and in-channel storage with feedback between in-channel storage and channel slope. The model was used to simulate spatial and temporal bed-sediment depths on an entire river network at the watershed scale. sources and sinks (i.e., bluffs, streambanks/floodplains, agricultural fields, and ravines). over millennial and decadal timescales (Gran et al. 2011, Belmont et al. 2011, Bevis 2015). With the river network as the basis of a simple model, inputs of sediment to the network are informed by the sediment budget and these inputs are tracked through the network using process-based time delays that incorporate uniform-flow hydraulics and at-capacity sediment transport. The result is a map of bed-material sediment depths throughout

Measuring suspended sediment concentrations and flow velocities using multibeam sonar.

Modern data handling and storage technologies facilitate the logging of the large quantity of water‐column backscatter information received by multibeam sonars. Methods of using these data to derive estimates of the mass concentration and flow velocities of suspended sediment flow structures have been developed. The results obtained by the application of these methodologies to data collected at the confluence of the Parana and Paraguay rivers in Argentina and the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the United States will be presented. An analysis of those data in conjunction with a set of experimental data collected in a large‐scale test facility will be also given. The applicability and limitations of the use of multibeam sonar for deriving suspended sediment concentrations will be discussed. By enabling the simultaneous measurements of suspended sediment concentration, flow velocities, and bathymetric data, multibeam echo‐sounders are demonstrated to be a versatile tool for the surveyin...

Measuring Gravity Currents in the Chicago River, Chicago, Illinois

Recent studies of the Chicago River have determined that gravity currents are responsible for persistent bidirectional flows that have been observed in the river. A gravity current is the flow of one fluid within another caused by a density difference between the fluids. These studies demonstrated how acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs) can be used to detect and characterize gravity currents in the field. In order to better understand the formation and evolution of these gravity currents, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has installed ADCPs and other instruments to continuously measure gravity currents in the Chicago River and the North Branch Chicago River. These instruments include stage sensors, thermistor strings, and both upward-looking and horizontal ADCPs. Data loggers and computers installed at gaging stations along the river are used to collect data from these instruments and transmit them to USGS offices.