Near-Census River Science

Participants

Gregory B. Pasternack, Joshua R. Wyrick, Anne E. Senter, Denise Tu, Leah Kammel, Bobby Gonzalez, Michael Strom, Rocko Brown, Jason Wiener, Pete Moniz, Arielle Gervasi, Sean Luis

Background

Modern science is based on the paradigm of sampling. By carefully selecting the right objects/places/units to sample and then measuring them just the right way, scientists have made dramatic leaps in human understanding. However, many time scientists have not selected objects/places/units properly and have not measured them correctly- or different groups do enough things differently and fail to document their procedures thoroughly and transparently, such that the wrong conclusions are drawn form individual studies and across many studies. Even worse, sampling only enables statistical answers to questions, whereas many problems require spatial or analytical answers where each data point is not independent or identically distributed. Many phenomena are nonstationary. We have reached the point in history where the paradigm of sampling must give way to the next way forward, and that way is "near-census" science. Near-census river science is a comprehensive, spatially explicit, process-based paradigm for studying rivers emphasizing the 1-m scale as the basic building block for characterizing geomorphic processes and ecological functions. By eliminating all the decisions that go into sample selection upfront, it is possible to analyze the totality of a landscape in fine detail with no compromises. This is the vision that we are developing in the Pasternack Lab.

Several more near-census river science projects are on-going and have not been added to this website yet.

Near-Census Projects

The near-census river science projects our group has worked on have either been done in partially confined gravel-cobble bed rivers and confined remote moutain rivers with a mix of bedrock and alluvium. The projects below are divided into these two groupings.