Fluvial field fun in Scotland
One of the components of the Climate Change and Mountain Basins project that is my central postdoc research, is an investigation of how climate change might alter the flow regime and different habitat factors for different species in different regions. To this end, we are working with the Northern Rivers Institute at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland to expand our analysis. I spent a month this past summer in the North Esk basin surveying basic reach-scale stream morphology characteristics in order to develop basin-scale predictions of salmonid habitat parameters (grain size for spawning). The rain-dominated system and strong influence of glacial lag material in the streams yield a different channel forms than I have been used to seeing in the snow-melt basins of the western US.
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