Next meeting Wednesday March 6th in DENVER

The next Colorado Geomorphology Organization (CoGO) meeting is this coming Wednesday, March 6, 2013 in Denver. We will be meeting at 7:00 pm on the campus of the University of Colorado at Denver (Room #3617 in the North Classroom Building - see attached map for building and parking lot locations).

Dr. Lee MacDonald will be the speaker for the evening. Dr. Lee MacDonald is a recently retired (“reallocated”) professor of Watershed Science at Colorado State University and a Senior Research Scientist at the Natural Resource Ecology Lab. His specialty is the effects of land use change on runoff and erosion, particularly in forested areas. For the past decade he has focused primarily on runoff and erosion from fires and roads, and his retirement has been seriously hindered as a result of new research on the 2012 High Park fire and salvage logging in northern California. Most of his publications and student theses are available from his web site: http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/~leemac/. He will be giving a talk titled: Effects of Wildfires on Soils, Runoff and Erosion: Causes, Rehabilitation, and Geomorphic Change.

Abstract:

Large wildfires are becoming increasingly common, and are projected to further increase with climate change. High-severity fires are of greatest concern because of the dramatic shift from subsurface stormflow to Horton overland flow. This basic change can increase the size of peak flows and hillslope erosion rates by up to several orders of magnitude compared to unburned conditions. The resulting effects on downstream channels, flooding, water quality, aquatic habitat, and reservoir sedimentation are of great concern to land managers, the public, and water providers. In this seminar I will summarize over a decade of work on fires, particularly in the Colorado Front Range. The specific objectives are to: 1) identify the key causes of the observed change in infiltration and increase in water-driven surface erosion; 2) discuss how the rate of recovery can vary with site conditions; 3) use this understanding to explain the observed variations in the effectiveness of different post-fire rehabilitation techniques; 4) discuss the role of high-severity fires as a major driver of landscape evolution, and how the rate and type of change can vary with elevation zone, flow regime, and watershed location. The seminar will conclude with a discussion of critical research needs at both extremes: the effects of fires at the pore scale, and the need to scale up our shorter-term, hillslope results in both time and space. Some of these needs will be illustrated by the contrasting results from the 2002 Hayman fire and the 2012 High Park fire (see pictures below).

We will be meeting prior to the talk for dinner at Fresh Craft (1530 Blake St, Suite A) in Denver at 5:30 pm. We will walk from the restaurant to the North Classroom building at UCD for the talk at 7pm. If you plan on coming for dinner, please let us know so we can make reservations.