past faculty RESEARCH
Each year, the Montana Water Center awards funding to Montana University System faculty through the Faculty Seed Grant Program. See below for more information on past Faculty Seed Grant projects.
2024 FACULTY SEED GRANTS
ANDREW FELTON AND ANNA SCHWEIGER: from probes to pixels: scaling-up soil water content monitoring across montana
Drought ranks among the primary threats to the sustainability and productivity of agriculture in Montana and across the Western US broadly, with climate change projections indicating increased frequency and intensity throughout this century. This suggests that agricultural production across Montana will be increasingly shaped by periods of water limitation. Of the many ways in which changes to water availability may manifest in agricultural systems, we expect alterations to root-zone soil water content to be the most consequential for dryland crop and forage production. Tools that can diagnose and forecast near-term changes to root-zone soil water content would aid producers and policy makers across Montana in making informed decisions within the short time that allows for adaptive management of agricultural resources.
This project seeks to “scale-up” real-time soil water content monitoring and forecasting across Montana. To this end, we propose to integrate Montana’s Mesonet with NASA’s SMAP satellite mission and environmental data predictive of soil water content dynamics. The Montana Mesonet is one of the largest state-level networks of soil water content monitoring in the United States, providing accurate, near-real-time root-zone soil water content measurements. However, tools to extrapolate these small-scale point measurements across large spatial extents are still missing. This project will build an initial data acquisition and assembly pipeline, and modeling framework to predict, map and forecast root-zone soil water content across Montana at intermediate spatial resolution. Gridded assessments and near-term forecasts of drought risk rooted in soil water content will not only benefit Montana stakeholders but also serve as a proof-of-concept to motivate proposal development for larger pools of funding to tackle soil water issues at the National level. This project will foster collaborations between early-career faculty within MSU and between MSU, the Montana Climate Office, and University of Montana’s Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group that is driving continental scale modeling efforts.
Dr. Andrew Felton is an assistant professor of plant and ecosystems ecology in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Science at Montana State University. His research is focused on understanding how water-limited ecosystems respond to climate-driven changes in water availability, with a focus on the western United States.
Dr. Anna Schweiger is an assistant professor of remote sensing in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Science at Montana State University. Her research is focused on developing scalable theory and methods for remote sensing of biodiversity and ecosystem function.
KAYHAN OSTOVAR: freshwater species of concern as bio-sentinels of pfas contamination
For the past 10 years, Dr. Ostovar has developed the first research of snapping turtles in Montana, and conducted demographic assessments of spiny softshell turtles. He works closely with colleagues of the Crow Tribe and recently surveyed the majority of rivers and streams across the Crow Reservation. His work with riverine turtles, as sentinel species, facilitates the assessment of water quality and dam-related hydrology changes. The proposed research on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) is critical as they are known to bioaccumulate in aquatic ecosystems and organisms. Recent MT DEQ surveys detected PFAS in Yellowstone River tributaries and below the waste water treatment plant in Billings. Freshwater turtles exhibit many suitable life history traits for assessing PFAS in aquatic systems, such as longevity, trophic position, environmental contaminant bioaccumulation, strong interannual site fidelity, and limited home ranges. This project funded by the Montana Water Center includes collaborators from the USFWS (Dr. Brian Balmer), and USGS (Dr. Erin Pulster).
Kayhan Ostovar is an Environmental Science and Wildlife Conservation professor at Rocky Mountain College (RMC) and the director of the Yellowstone River Research Center. He enjoys exploring rivers and engaging undergraduate students and communities in river conservation. He previously directed scientific specimen collections on a 2-month expedition on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and leads an annual Yellowstone River cleanup effort, resulting in the removal of more than 316,000 lbs. of trash in 18 years.
PAYTON GARDNER: Using environmental tracers to estimate distributed groundwater discharge, source and residence time
The primary goal of this project is to identify locations of groundwater discharge, quantify groundwater discharge volume, and characterize the residence time and chemical composition of groundwater discharge to a study reach along the upper Clark Fork River near Warm Springs. We will synoptically sample the stream for a suite of environmental tracers, discharge and water quality including major and minor elemental chemistry, pH, dissolved oxygen, and specific conductivity. Models of stream discharge and geochemical transport will be fit to the observed synoptic datasets. The result will be a spatially distributed map of groundwater discharge location, magnitude, age, and geochemical composition along the reach. This map will help scientists, engineers and resource managers develop better conceptual models of groundwater-stream water interactions in this complex area, optimize future research and remediation design, and better forecast long-term recovery of water quality. The techniques developed during this study, will further enhance the use of environmental tracer surveys to constrain groundwater-stream water interactions and provide the technical basis, and seed data sets for future, large-scale research proposals aimed at expanding the spatial and temporal scope of application and interpretation
Dr. Gardner is an Associate Professor of Hydrogeology, in the Department of Geosciences at The University of Montana. Dr. Gardner’s research and teaching is centered around groundwater and its role in hydrologic, geochemical and geological processes, with particular focus on mountain aquifer systems, regional groundwater flow and groundwater and stream water interactions.