Jack Schmidt, Mitchell Center Talk Series, 10/5/2015

Title: Restoring the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers: The visionary and the practical

Speaker: Jack C. Schmidt, Professor of Stream Geomorphology, Utah State University

The Rio Grande and the Colorado River are the two great rivers of western North America shared by Mexico and the United States. Both rivers carry snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains across semiarid and arid regions where water demand is high, and both rivers are fully utilized in places, such that no stream flow remains in the channel. In the face of declining runoff in a warming climate, the challenges to river rehabilitation are daunting, yet small successes have occurred in different parts of these watersheds. These small successes are notable, but a large-scale vision of the opportunities and constraints is needed if the native ecosystems of these rivers are to be maintained or rehabilitated in the future.

Jack Schmidt is Professor of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University. Jack’s research has focused on describing the century-scale changes to river channel form and the causes of those changes. He has been actively involved in numerous efforts to rehabilitate large rivers, especially of the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. He was awarded the 2009 National Park Service Directors Award for Natural Resources Research for his work throughout the National Park system concerning the management of large regulated rivers. He was a member of the bi-national team who received a 2013 Partners in Conservation Award from the Secretary of Interior for their work in implementing the pulse flow release into the delta of the Colorado River. Between 2010 and 2014, Jack served as Chief of the USGS Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, the science arm of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program.

For information about the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, go to https://umaine.edu/mitchellcenter/.