As we launch the second year of our National Science Foundation-supported planning grant Science to Advance Freshwater Ecosystem and Community Resilience in the Appalachians (SAFER Apps), we are pleased to provide this website where we have linked a project overview, recordings our spring 2025 virtual roundtables, and the agenda for our July 2025 field trip in Vermont with project partners from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, along with participants from Vermont conservation organizations and state agencies. 

On the anniversaries of the July 2023 and July 2024 flooding in Vermont, our local news media have been covering the impacts to communities, recovery work underway, and research at UVM that aims to better understand flood risk and provide resiliency solutions for Vermonters. See the WPTZ (NBC news affiliate) interview with Beverley here and listen to Vermont Public’s hour long episode of Vermont Edition here (Beverley interviewed in the last 20 minutes of this program).

Our paper Identifying Hydraulically Distinct Floodplain Types From High Resolution Topography With Implications for Broad-Scale Flood Routing was published today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface. This work was made possible through support from NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology. Congratulations to Rebecca Diehl for leading this work!

Our paper leveraging 20+ years of streamflow monitoring on Mt. Mansfield has been published today in Hydrologic Processes –  Warmer Winters Drive Declines in Snowpack and Consequent Increases in Annual and Seasonal Runoff in a Headwater Region of the Northeastern United States. This work was supported by grants from the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology and the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab. Congratulations to Kate Hale for leading this work!

Our talented group of CIROH post-docs presented their research in a series of weekly seminars in Fall 2023. This stellar group brings expertise in water sensing technologies, fluvial geomorphology, ecosystem services valuation, data assimilation and modeling, risk communication and more. See the full set of seminar topics at our CIROH @ UVM website.

Our first product of the LCBP floodplains project – this paper, lead authored by Rebecca Diehl, was published today in PLOS One. Thanks to Vermont EPSCoR for their Twitter post on the paper’s release.

Rebecca Diehl presented a final report today to the Technical Advisory Committee of the Lake Champlain Basin Program (LCBP) on our two-year study to map floodplains in the basin and quantify the deposition of sediment and sediment-bound phosphorus. After technical review, a final report on the project will be available on the LCBP website at https://www.lcbp.org/news-and-media/publications/technical-reports/

Graduate student Stephi Drago was selected by the New England-St.Lawrence Valley (NESTVAL) chapter of the Association of American Geographers for best student paper presented at the regional conference on November 14, 2020. Stephi’s presentation described her M.S. thesis research – contributing to the mapping of floodplains in the Lake Champlain basin of Vermont, estimating floodwater storage on floodplains, and development of a protocol to identify restoration opportunities along in-active rail lines improve river-floodplain connectivity. Congratulations Stephi on this recognition of your work!

Julyance (July) Cruz is joining us this summer as an EPSCoR intern funded under our “Basin Resilience to Extreme Events” grant by the National Science Foundation. July hails from Puerto Rico, where she was involved in EPSCoR as a high school student. She is now a student at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, where she has worked with our EPSCoR and is known for her “can do” approach to challenging tasks. This summer, July will be helping us build our dataset of sediment and phosphorus deposition on floodplains in the Lake Champlain basin of Vermont. Welcome July – we’re thrilled to have you as part of our team! 

Congratulations to Matt Vaughan on publication of his paper in Limnology & Oceanography Methods on the use of UV-visible spectrophotometry to detect phosphorus species in river water.  Vanesa Perillo just had her paper on phosphorus availability in stream corridor soils accepted in the Journal of Environmental Quality.  Check back soon for paper pdfs on our Publications page.