Water Quality by Remote Sensing
The availability of clean water poses a growing concern in light of continued global population rise and industrialization. As a member of the KSU Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI), I make use of my expertise in sedimentology, and the use of electromagnetic sensing tools to assess water quality in the Lake Erie watershed. These projects are conducted in collaboration with Dr. Mandy Munro-Stasiuk (KSU Department of Geography), and Donna Witter (KSU Geology), and our students. One of my Ph.D. students, Nishanthi Weijkoon, is funded my a NERR Fellowship to develop methods to rapidly asses algal biomass, suspended sediment, and percent cover of aquatic vegetation in Old Woman Creek, a National Estuarine Research Reserve, using LandSat 5 and 7 data in conjunction with ground-based spectroradiometry, and lab measurements of particle size and concentration, and spectral properties of water samples collected from Old Woman Creek . I have co-mentored three NSF-funded WRRI REU students working to evaluate the relationships between particles and water color in Lake Erie. These studies provide insights into the influence of suspended sediment and plant pigment concentration on water quality in Lake Erie. Sarah Reagan (KSU Biology) evaluated the effectiveness of SeaWiFs satellite data at predicting algal biomass in Lake Erie. Drew Feucht (College of Wooster) measured the suspended sediment concentration and particle size distribution in the Western Basin of Lake Erie, Kathy Wilson (Sweet Briar College) measured particle size spectra and spectral reflectance properties of water samples from all three basins of Lake Erie to quantify differences in the plant pigments present in the Western as opposed to the Central and Eastern Basins.