Kristin Sweeney
University of Portland, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Drainage divides are the ridges that separate one watershed from the next. Over geologic time, they shift in response to changes in climate and tectonics, the slow movement and deformation of Earth's crust.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
drainage divides
watershed boundaries
drainage basin
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Compare how drainage divides move in soil-mantled landscapes with soil creep versus steep rocky landscapes shaped by landslides, using digital topographic mapping and field sediment measurements.
- Measure grain size and erosion rates from cosmogenic nuclides, atoms produced by cosmic rays in surface rock, at sites in the Ozark Plateau, Oregon Coast Range and San Gabriel Mountains.
- Test existing topographic metrics for divide instability and develop quantitative methods that bring steep, rocky landscapes into landscape evolution models.
More about the research
As divides move, they redirect water and sediment, and they can split or join populations of aquatic organisms, driving their evolution into new species. Most past research has explained divide motion through river channels. This collaborative project instead asks how processes on hillslopes shape where divides go.
Why it matters
The work could improve predictions of how watershed boundaries shift over time. These boundaries control where water and sediment flow, and they shape the evolution and speciation of aquatic organisms. Methods that work in steep, landslide-prone mountains would extend divide-instability tools to landscapes that current theory handles poorly.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katharine Huntington
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine the source, depositional age and grain-size distribution of megaflood deposits along the Yarlung-Siang-Brahmaputra river system in the eastern Himalaya, using field observations and laboratory analytical tools.
Jessica Stanley
University of Idaho, ID·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify Cenozoic exhumation and relief growth in the upper Gallatin drainage using apatite (U-Th)/He and 4He/3He thermochronology, methods that date when rocks cooled near the surface, on valley-to-ridge transects of Cretaceous and Eocene intrusive rocks.
Aaron Maxwell
West Virginia University, WV·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Develop convolutional neural network methods for semantic and instance segmentation to extract geomorphic features from LiDAR point clouds and terrain derivatives such as hillshades.
The school
University of Portland: 2 labs on PI Pages.
Reach out
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