Fall 2025 NRES Seminar Series
Resilience at the intersection of science and engineering - Twenty years of research and discovery to advance water prediction in the Southern Appalachians
Nearly one billion people live in Earth’s mountainous regions, and more than 50% of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are in areas of complex terrain. From headwaters to foreland basins, mountains function as Water Towers (WTs) to their adjacent landscapes (valleys and plains, steppes, savannahs, and prairies) that encompass the breadbasket regions of the world. Changes in land-use and land-cover result in changes in precipitation and land-atmosphere interactions across temporal and spatial scales, impacting the phenomenology of extreme events, landscape resilience, and water availability for both ecosystems and people. I first review recent advances in our current understanding of water processes spanning µm to km scales, building on 20 years of field and laboratory work, remote sensing, and model development in the Southern Appalachians. I demonstrate the translation of this research to specific examples of territorial planning and water prediction, including the physics foundation for AI success and long-lead flash-flood guidance to improve disaster preparedness.
Ana Barros
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign