Wrapping Up the 2025 Field Season

Marked by the successful completion of our Fall takedown trip, another field season is in the books for the AU Hydrology Lab! We had a very productive Summer across our three major research projects thanks to the dedicated work of our students, research assistants, technicians and post docs!

SMHCO

Thanks to research assistants, Kaitlyn and Katrina, for continuing the weekly measurements of stream discharge, groundwater levels and water chemistry throughout the entire Summer. This season, we also saw the fruits of our troubleshooting with the ISCO automatic water samplers. We're eager to see the data from the lab analysis of these samples! Stony Mountain was also the host of several new weather stations this year!

DPL

DPL has just closed out its sixth year working on the mine site and realized many successes thanks to research assistants, Ethan and Jess. During the Summer of 2025, new atmometers were implemented in the field to measure local Evapotranspiration, and ten new reference lakes were explored to inform project goals. Now we are looking forward to welcoming new team members to carry on this work!

Aspen

The Summer of 2025 was the third full season in the field at Aspen, and our first full season with both Eddy Covariance towers up and running at their permanent locations and configurations. It will be exciting to dive into this data over the winter! Thanks to research assistant, Euan, and Master's student, Saeed, for maintaining the instrumentation in the field and collecting weekly measurements of stream discharge through culverts, groundwater levels and evapotranspiration. New Post Doc, Murdoch, also joined Euan and Saeed to collect tree cores for dendrochronological analysis and dust samples to assess road dust deposition.