First Natural Infrastructure Graduate Fellow Defends Thesis


We’re very excited to announce that Madlyn Carpenter will defend her Master’s thesis on Monday, July 8th. Madlyn is part of the Natural Infrastructure Graduate Fellowship, an educational initiative formed by the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems (IRIS) at the University of Georgia and Ducks Unlimited.

Graduate students in this program conduct practice-oriented and basic research on natural infrastructure methods and engineering guidance, tool development, cost and economic analysis, monitoring and adaptive management, and social dimensions of climate resilient infrastructure with an emphasis on integration of natural and conventional systems. To learn more about the program or apply, visit this page.

Madlyn’s abstract: Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as reducing phosphorus (P) pollution and providing habitat for waterfowl. Lake Erie, one of the five Laurentian Great Lakes, suffers from harmful algal blooms in its western basin which are associated with P loading from the Maumee River Watershed (MRW). Some waterfowl populations in the MRW have declined significantly in recent decades. Ducks Unlimited (DU), a major partner in wetland conservation in the MRW, has identified a need for improved wetland restoration for meeting the dual goals of providing waterfowl habitat and improving water quality through P retention through site selection, design, and management. This research identified three objectives in support of these goals: 1) create subbasin prioritization maps for wetland restoration in the Great Lakes Region in accordance with DU’s high-priority criteria, 2) create a practical, intermediate complexity tool with minimal inputs to help practitioners probabilistically predict P retention, and 3) utilize the novel tool to test design and management scenarios for wetland performance to identify water management and design approaches that simultaneously improve P retention and waterfowl habitat suitability. Data from 249 wetlands with agricultural runoff as their primary pollutant of interest were input into a k-C model to generate P retention estimates, and waterfowl habitat suitability was assessed based on preferred foraging depths. Results show that active, dynamic management of water depth can help reduce tradeoffs between wetland objectives and that larger wetlands (2-7% of subbasin area) tend to outperform smaller wetlands in meeting both objectives.

Details for joining Madlyn’s defense:
Monday, July 8th at 9:00 a.m.
I-STEM Research Building 2 – Room 3205
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/91463970585