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Tyler Marino:
To begin, I will open with past works. I had engaged in a trial research period with Dr Yixuan Sun, a math professor at Oxford University. I was attempting to use machine learning to model and predict flooding in the United Kingdom given short period data. I went in with little knowledge and experience with academic research and frankly made a fool of myself. I had ideas and work to show, but I did not understand what I was doing, how I was doing it. In and amongst this process, I couldn't help but see the complex networks of rivers that ran through the United Kingdom. There were and are no good sources on flood modeling using networks, however I see value in this study. For this project, I wanted to take this attempt, and see if I could strike out on a new endeavor. An end to end research project is unattainable in this short time, but I wanted to lay some groundwork for the future. My goals were to blend my current skills with my excitement to learn new programs that can boost future works.
I personally do not have as much experience with the Delta and all its inner working as Alex does, however when he proposed this idea, I saw it as a way to get involved with an ecological issue close to home. I am passionate about using technology for the benefit of the earth, rather than the benefit of the consumer. In order to sustain life on this planet, which I feel optimistic about requires action and this is one step that could eventually lead to action.
Alex Brown:
I'm part of a multicampus research project that is just getting launched to understand the social and ecological landscape around salinity management in the Delta during extended drought. I plan to work with Dr. Laurel Larsen the Delta Lead Scientist, a USGS position housed within the Delta Stewardship Council. The work has implications for how the state might invest in "green" and "gray" infrastructure and consider regulatory alternatives in the face of climate change and sea-level rise.
I am looking to build a team workshop, coordinate field trips, develop a project website, and produce outreach materials dealing with the challenge of salinity management in the Delta. These steps will cultivate a Bay Delta community of discussion and practice on our campus next semester.
The knowledge gained working on this project paired with attending the CWEMF In Fulsom, has created the foundations for building a community on campus. This group will create new projects by working with the existing CWEMF model inventory.
We selected the research paper, "The Delta Connectome: A network-based framework for studying connectivity in river deltas" by Paola Passalacqua(University of Texas at Austin). Inspired by the increasing water levels of deltas, especially that of the Mississippi River Delta, Paola was searching for new ways to interpret the delta. Like us, they found that delta connectivity is often overlooked. Interactions, both physical and conceptual, will hopefully grant insight as to how this everchanging network evolves over time. There is an urgency, not necessarily to save the rich soil and land that lives inside the delta system, but learn how we can adapt our systems to harness the everchanging landscape. It is the complexity of these systems that also interests Paola. No two are alike.
These systems raise questions about damns and reservoirs for the reason that they inhibit sediment flows which are the main factor in maintaining above ground deltas. Levees act in a very similar way by directly pumping rich sediment out to oceans or bays. According to this paper, in the Mississippi delta, "The construction of levees has contributed to the loss of 1/3 of the land since colonization as sediment is routed to the Gulf of Mexico by a very efficient pipe flow. There are other factors that go into this as we attempt to encroach on the delta and in turn build artificial flood mitigation techniques.
Many regions of interest exist in the delta, the islands they form, channels, however there is not too much information on how they relate to one another. With a combination of on-site field work and remote sensing imaging, developing these complex networks is becoming more accessible and complete. With this complete studies such as this paper are able to "quantify aspects of physical connectivity among different portions of the system(physical adjacency - structural connectivity) and to analyze how that adjacency affects fluxes of water, sediment, nutrients (functional connectivity) and information (process connectivity)."
The review of networks over time, how they mold to fit the climate, weather, and human pressure is also discussed in this paper.
From this paper, we take away that the connectivity analysis of delta networks is non-classical and requires new mathematical approaches to fit these networks!
Paper Link: The Delta Connectome
This shows the ability to take Landsat data and visualize the delta and then on the right they throw out all links with width less than 60 meters.
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