PhD candidate Jinyu Wang recently published her first lead author paper in Science of the Total Environment! Jinyu’s study employs a new ‘lab-in-the-field’ technology which we refer to as the RiverLab. Essentially the concept is to circumvent the need to go out to a stream or river and collect a water sample, bring it back to the lab and then analyze its chemical composition. Instead, the RiverLab brings a modern day analytical facility to the banks of a river, allowing semi-automated, real time and round the clock analysis of water chemistry at the highest frequency afforded by the instruments. Jinyu used the data from our RiverLab deployment on the banks of the Upper Sangamon River, in combination with a similar deployment in France as well as a high-frequency dataset from the United Kingdom. Across these three disparate watersheds, Jinyu showed that storm events have a disproportionate effect on catchment solute exports beyond what would be extrapolated based on lower frequency data. She showed that commonly applied load estimation algorithms can produce >40% underestimates of nutrient fluxes if they are based on monthly sampling frequency. This work represents an international collaborative effort, as well as the first deployment of RiverLab technology on the North American continent. Congratulations Jinyu!

 

Related topics: