Research

2024 ©craigbrinkerhoff

Drainage networks are the arteries of the continents, an interconnected network of rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, and more that drain the land surface and transport water and nutrients downstream. River science draws on hydrology, geomorphology, ecology, biogeochemistry, and engineering to take a broad approach to studying drainage networks and water resources.

But what would river science look like globally? It is impossible to constrain hydrology using in situ sensors because we cannot install them in every river on Earth. An alternative is to measure large areas all at once using satellites to ‘fill in the gaps’, but they have varying spatial and temporal resolutions. And while numerical modeling may provide continuous simulations, these are not direct observations. Finally, despite much progress there is still a disconnect between our small-scale process understanding, its integration into global models, and the use of these models for water resource management. All told, these limitations have downstream effects on what river science questions we can answer at scale, which in turn hampers our ability to understand and manage global freshwater resource issues.

My work reconciles this problem by drawing on my broad training and integrating all the above approaches simultaneously to answer a single research question: “how could fundamental river science improve our understanding of global freshwater resources and our ability to sustainably manage them?”. To do this, I (1) develop remote sensing algorithms and computational models for fluvial transport, (2) develop fundamental river science theory, and (3) work directly with field scientists and policy researchers to develop an integrated assessment of water resources. When this is done at scale (“taking the pulse of global rivers”), we can answer previously unanswerable questions and push the boundary of not only river science but also freshwater policy, regulation, and management.