Rebecca Diehl: Flood Inundation Mapping and Nutrient Retention

Floodplain inundation maps provide insight into ecosystem services and help communicate flood risk, yet existing maps are spatially limited and difficult to update.

In this talk, recent Gund Postdoctoral Fellow Rebecca Diehl discusses how her team developed a probabilistic, low-complexity floodplain mapping tool capable of identifying flood inundation extents relatively rapidly and applied it to the Lake Champlain Basin in Vermont. The resulting maps help describe patterns of phosphorus retention on floodplains and are informing Vermont's Functioning Floodplain Initiative, a multi-disciplinary initiative to develop a mapping and tracking tool for protecting and restoring floodplains and wetlands.

Rebecca Diehl is a Research Assistant Professor in the Geography Department at UVM. Her research is motivated by the need for science-based tools to assist in the management of rivers and watersheds. Currently, she is focused on building an understanding of the functioning of floodplains in Vermont using terrain-based models and a network of monitoring sites.