Catalina Segura
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Clean, reliable water depends on how rain and snow travel through hillsides into streams and how much water the ground can hold. This is especially true for small headwater streams, which feed larger rivers.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
hydrology
headwater streams
wildfire
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Determine how burning of vegetation alone versus vegetation and soil changes snow accumulation, snowmelt, streamflow and underground water storage in burned Willamette National Forest watersheds, using snow surveys, geophysics and soil infiltration tests.
- Compare post-fire water movement and streamflow generation across watersheds using 70 years of H.J. Andrews hydrometric records, pre-fire water chemistry and watershed models, including sensitivity to the snow–rain transition zone.
- Relate geology, landforms and topography to catchment water storage in headwater streams of 0.1–62 km², using water stable isotopes and electrical conductivity as tracers alongside LiDAR terrain metrics.
- Build catchment-scale models combining tracer data, LTER stream and weather records and LiDAR to predict storm transit times and water storage at unmonitored locations.
More about the research
Scientists still cannot measure this underground storage directly or fully predict the paths water takes. Wildfires add another unknown, now that large fires are striking wet Pacific Northwest forests where fire used to be rare. Both projects work in the mountain watersheds of western Oregon, many at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. Together they ask how landscape and disturbance shape where water goes.
Why it matters
Forest and water managers in the Pacific Northwest need to know how increasingly common wildfires affect the amount and quality of water delivered downstream. Methods to estimate underground water storage from terrain maps and tracers could improve predictions of clean-water supply in unmonitored streams. This could help communities adapt to logging, urbanization and climate change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nicoleta Cristea
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure sap flux, soil moisture and snow across forest stands of different ages in western Washington to test how forest regrowth after clear-cut harvest affects summer low streamflows.
Mary Armstead
Marshall University, WV·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify what controls flash floods in disturbed and forested headwater streams in Kentucky and West Virginia, using sensors, field data and catchment-scale hydrologic models.
Jacqueline Gerson
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify long-term trends in streamwater concentrations of 60 trace and ultratrace elements in boreal streams from 1985 to 2023, across decades and across nested catchments.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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