Meghan Engh Presents Her Work at the AGU Conference
Meghan Engh ’18 (Environmental Science) and Iris Stewart-Frey presented a poster on urban stream temperatures under warm climate regimes at the recent American Geophysical Union annual conference. Their work investigates whether the recent high-intensity California drought and the very recent very warm years may affect urban streams in different ways than those less influenced by human activity. To that end, stream temperature variability and change between urban and non-urban settings were compared over several climatic regimes. Results showed that the frequency of occurrence of periods of elevated stream temperatures are greater during both warm and dry and warm and wet periods for both urban and non-urban streams, but urban streams remain warmer through all climatic conditions. Reservoirs and removal of riparian shading further increase stream temperatures in urban streams, increasing the frequency with which temperature threshold requirements for cold water fish are crossed. Meghan is an intrepid stream wader and currently pursues graduate studies in hydrology at Indiana University.