Dr. Power is a food web ecologist at UC Berkeley, where she leads the Power lab which has compiled careful, long term data sets in the Angelo Reserve in Northern CA.

In addition to her early work, in Panama and the Ozarks - which we touch on briefly - Dr. Power’s multi-decadal data sets on the Eel River, have yielded remarkable findings about how food webs function in gravel bed rivers…and spoiler alert, it sometimes involves the sorts of things we tend to talk about here…like the gravel - and how it transports.

While this is a physical science podcast, I hoped to include interviews with river Ecologists from the beginning particularly ecologists who make careful observations
at that interface of physical and biological processes. And I always hoped I could kick that emphasis off with Dr. Power.

I teach an Ecogeomorphology module in one of our classes here at HEC and I always lead that with the Eel river story she shares About 20 minutes into this episode.
That Eel river story was one of the early influences that got me interested in the ecological interactions with river mechanics processes.

I also asked Mary about a couple of Ecological models and categories, that have corollaries in geomorphology. So we talked about disturbance, alternative stable states as well as the Box model and the Ideal Free Distribution, which are just really helpful ideas for anyone who is interested in rivers.

Dr. Power was induced into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Links:
Serengeti Rules:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/serengeti-rules-dhbtnm/19906/
Disturbance and Recover of Algal Assemblage on OK Stream
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2425975
Resource Enhancement: Armored Catfish, Algae, and Sediment
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1937361

Episode Photo: Eel River

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

Dr Alain Recking has quantified gravel bed transport with just about all the tools available to our discipline.

In addition to substantial field work- Dr. Recking has done some important and influential flume experiments.

We have talked and will talk about hiding and armoring quite a bit in this podcast, because they are difficult ideas, that are hard to measure and simulate, and critical to gravel bed processes.

But Dr. Recking’s contributions to this vertical sorting conversation destabilizes armoring theory a bit…kind of literally,

He found that in high gradient channels, at equilibrium flows, vertical sorting doesn’t necessarily reach an equilibrium, but can be episodic, which is important because it leads to the pulsed transport processes.

And the story he tells about how he discovered this...is just kind of narrative science at its very best.

The other characteristic of Alain’s work that I think is remarkable is his a knack for pulling together immense data sets (often including substantial data from the American West) in order to pose important quantitative questions on the meta-analyses scale.

And so we talked about how this lead to his gravel-bed flow-resistance work and – what I consider – the most important sediment transport equation, since the Parker/Wilcock-Crowe generation of innovation.

We also talk about Bedload Web, where he has collected many of the measurements he used to to these analyses: https://en.bedloadweb.com/

Dr. Recking works for INRAE – The French National Research Institute of Agriculture, Food, and Environment a research consortium focused on sustainable development in those arenas.

This week, on the RSM River Mechanics podcast, we talk high gradient sorting, quantitative meta-analyses with Alain Recking.

We also posted videos clips with his experiments here: https://youtu.be/jKFlMAkD7qo

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248

A couple years ago, my agency asked me to write some guidance on sediment modeling, so, I reached out to the morphological modelers I knew, and particularly the model developers who write the morphological model code other people use.

I asked them about the common failure modes they have seen and best practices they teach, and realized we had all essentially spent a decade or two, learning the same principles.

So when the US federal agencies held their periodic Federal interagency sediment conference (SEDHYD) last year, I invited three of the model developers I have learned from over the years (Alex Sanchez, Gary Brown, and Blair Greimann), to participate in a panel discussion on their lessons learned.

And the panel was much more popular than we expected. It turns out, there’s appetite conversations like this. So, I turned on the mics and we did a little editing, and we’re running it here.

Here are brief bios for our guests.:

Gary Brown did his graduate work at the university of Florida and works at the Coastal and Hydraulics Lab which is part of ERDC, the Corp’s major R&D center in Vicksburg Mississippi. He’s been developing sediment models for 29 years including SEDLIB, a set of sediment algorithms that are called by ERDC’s hydraulic model, ADH or Adaptive hydraulics.

Alex Sanchez sits in the office next to me. For the last 9 years, he has worked here at HEC and spearheaded the work to add 2D sediment to HEC-RAS which includes a novel formulation for the sub-grid approach. But actually Alex started developing sediment models at ERDC’s Coastal and Hydraulics Lab where he worked for 8 years, while working on the Coastal Modeling System which is still used for Corps of Engineers coastal applications.

Blair Greimann got his PhD from the University of Iowa and worked at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Technical Service Center in Denver for more than 23 years, before his recent move to Stantec. While working at the Bureau Blair led the development of SRH-1D and applied this model to a range of projects including the Matilija and and Klamath Dam removals.

Finally, we were lucky enough to have Doug Shields moderating this session so you will hear from him in the breaks between the four sub-topics. Dr. Shields, worked for more than 20 years at the Sedimentation Lab of the Agricultural Resource Center in Oxford MS and 10 years at ERDC and has taught at both Tennessee State and Old Miss and we were fortunate to draw Doug as a moderator. (Note: I did not mic Doug, but wanted to keep his thoughtful and winsome transitions, so his sound quality is not at the same level as the rest of the recording).

After Doug and I introduced the session you will hear from Blair Greimann, Alex Sanchez, me again, and Gary Brown in that order.

The conference paper associated with this session is here:
https://www.sedhyd.org/2023Program/1/157.pdf

Thank you to the SEDHYD organizers (including but not limited to ) for hosting this conversation

This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.

Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.

Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.

Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast

...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson

If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248