The USGS-PSU Partnership (UPP) offers awards biennially for water science research projects that include one principal investigator from USGS and one from PSU. Known as the ‘UPP Seed Grant’ program, its intention is to fund research that can serve as the foundation for larger proposals to research-funding organizations.
We are thrilled to announce that the 2023 UPP Seed Grant is awarded to David Burnett, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at PSU, and James White, hydrologist with the USGS Oregon Water Science Center, for their shared project, “Developing tools and workflows for acoustic, unattended, monitoring of river bedload.”
Bedload transport, or the movement of gravels, cobbles, and other clasts that roll and bounce along the river bed, is a foundational component of hydrology, geomorphology, and riverine ecosystems. When and where bed sediment moves along the river corridor, and how much bed sediment a river carries, has ramifications for natural hazards, such as flooding and erosion, as well as water availability and infrastructure.
Despite this importance, measuring and modeling bedload flux–the amount of sediment material that moves downstream–remains challenging and is subject to high levels of uncertainty.
Passive acoustic samplers are electronic instruments that continuously record underwater sound using underwater microphones known as hydrophones. Pairing hydrophone data with signal processing techniques to assess, for example, frequency content during flood events, can facilitate more accurate assessments of bed-material movement along rivers compared to conventional methods.
However, this is an emerging technique and current instruments and analytical approaches are limited in utility, reliability, and accessibility. This new collaboration between PSU and USGS aims to develop a new generation of low-power deployable hydrophone instruments by improving instrument accuracy, reliability, and longevity, as well as making the tools and signal analysis needed to characterize sediment transport more accessible to a broad range of users.
UPP: How did this project, and your partnership on it, come to be?
James: “This project started somewhat serendipitously. We (USGS) have recently begun experimenting with passive acoustic monitors (i.e., hydrophones) to help quantify the movement of gravels and cobbles in rivers, when I happened to listen to a podcast discussing how these instruments are used in marine environments. Faculty at PSU's Electrical and Computer Engineering department [ECE] were mentioned in the podcast, at which point we reached out to learn more about their work and discuss potential collaboration of deploying hydrophones in riverine environments. It was a natural fit, as USGS has expertise in river systems, but lack the knowledge and experience of building complex sensors, while David and others at PSU have extensive experience in building innovative sensors for environmental monitoring, including a wealth of experience with electronics for oceanographic applications.”
UPP: What are your hopes for this project?
James: “We have a few goals for the project. At the highest level, we aim to develop instruments that can be deployed in rivers for long periods of time (6+ months) that collect underwater sound data.”
David: “…and someday expand to other types of data such as chemical content.”
James: “These instruments need to be robust enough to withstand floods while also sensitive enough to capture targeted acoustic frequencies.
“To maximize the impact of this project, our instruments need to be affordable and easy to build so that a broad range of users can deploy them in river systems all over the world.
“We also aim to develop automated tools to analyze the data collected to assess when, and potentially how much and what size sediments, move in rivers. Such techniques will help facilitate use of these instruments and methods to a broader group of scientists and managers. Ultimately, the data used and assessed through this process can help inform important societal questions such as how to identify and reduce flood and erosion risk, as well as how to develop streamflow regimes to improve aquatic ecosystems.”
David: “I hope this project starts a pattern of research with USGS to create novel scientific tools that can be used to greatly expand the quantity and quality of data that can be feasibly collected from the environment. There are so many applications that can benefit from our core low-power wireless design principles, and riverine systems are just the beginning. I also hope to train some enthusiastic students as part of this project who will go on to create their own environmental sensing systems!”
UPP: Thoughts on the collaborative aspect of the UPP Seed Grant program?
James: “We are excited that the UPP provides an opportunity for developing collaborative projects and new relationships between the USGS and PSU.”
David: “The UPP provides opportunities for truly transformational work by enabling scientists and engineers to work together and invent novel environmental sensor systems that have the potential to revolutionize scientific fields.”
Congratulations, David and James! Work on this project begins in Fall 2023.
For more information, contact upp@pdx.edu.