John Kemper
Tell us about yourself:
My name is John Kemper (he/him) and I am a postdoc at Colorado State University working with Ellen Wohl as well as at the University of Vermont working with Andrew Schroth. Originally from Philadelphia, I've loved streams and rivers since I was young, though for years I thought they *all* had shopping carts in them. Later, I parlayed this love into research on urban stream geomorphology and sediment transport both as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland and at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) as a Master's student. After finishing my MS, I swapped the urban landscape for the high deserts of southwestern Wyoming and western Colorado (where any town over 100 counts as an urban center) and got my PhD studying the connections between tributary erosion and downstream forest establishment with Sara Rathburn at CSU. After defending my doctorate, I started a short-term postdoc with Ellen Wohl examining the capacity of natural infrastructure (e.g., floodplains) to store and modulate the flux of water, sediment, and carbon in the Colorado River Basin. And I just recently started a postdoc position at the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) at University of Vermont, where I'm working with Andrew Schroth (and others) to understand how sediment and nutrients move through the landscape (by marrying field work, high-frequency sensor networks, and National Water Model outputs).
What is your research about?
I'm a fluvial geomorphologist who is broadly interested in the behavior of the fluvial system as a linked network of processes. That is, I am interested how processes in one part of the system - say, changing land use - result in alterations to additional processes separated across space and time - say, downstream ecosystem dynamics. More specifically, I'm interested in the flux of materials through the landscape - sediment, water, and nutrients - and how that transport both controls and is controlled by the morphology of river landscapes. I look to track material through watersheds using a variety of methods, including sediment fingerprinting, large-scale models, and high-frequency sensor networks.
What excites you about your research?
Though we have a good first order understanding of how watersheds function, there is much more to be known about how any specific watershed operates and/or responds to change. My research seeks to leverage both field work and emerging technologies to better unravel the intricacies of how any given system functions, enabling us to better anticipate how changes to one component (e.g., vegetation assemblages due to climate change) will propagate through and impact additional processes at broader scales. What's most exciting to me is that though watersheds are complex puzzles, they can be understood by carefully and thoughtfully reading the landscapes and monitoring relevant parameters. Additionally, I am always excited by the frequent opportunities I get to stare at rivers, raft and canoe on rivers, and otherwise be in and around...rivers!
What broader importance does your research have for society?
As we progress towards our ever uncertain and delicate future, our ability to ensure that fragile riverine landscapes survive is predicated on a robust place-based understanding of how they function. My work emphasizes that as we begin to unravel how watersheds function as interconnected process networks, we can begin to see how they must be managed for the future - as entire systems, rather than piece-by-piece! I hope to one day help to enable management of rivers to occur at the basin scale, with managers and practitioners upstream communicating and working in tandem with those far downstream.
What inspired you to pursue a career in Earth Science?
Many, many things. Like others, I had the great fortune and privilege of spending time outside as a child, often along creeks - I was always fascinated by the fact that something upstream (like, say, a stick, tossed by a kid) ended up downstream. In school, I was blessed with several fantastic science teachers; outside of school, my dad brought me to nature as often as he could, and instilled in me a great love of it. As an undergraduate, I had a wonderful professor - Dr. Karen Prestegaard - who showed me that nature - that rivers! - could begin to be understood (to a degree) by observing thoughtfully and thinking carefully. And I was hooked!
What are you looking to do after you complete your PhD or postdoc?
I am looking for a faculty position! Ideally I would like to be in the American West and study the plethora of streams and rivers this wonderful landscape has to offer, but mostly I'd just be happy to get to study rivers, wherever that may be.
Given unlimited funding and access to resources, what is your dream project that you would pursue?
So many come to mind. The first that pops into my head is that I have recently become interested in how large snow avalanches impact the functioning of mountain streams, but we have a limited knowledge of where past large avalanches have occurred. If we were able to map the locations of large snow slides for several mountain regions over, say, the past 25 years, we could then begin to target investigations for how such occurrences have influenced the functioning of high mountain streams (i.e., by depositing large volumes of wood into the channel). This understanding would have ample implications for anticipating how high mountain streams - which are fragile, vulnerable landscapes - will respond to future climatic changes that will influence snow avalanche dynamics in complex ways.
What else do you do? Any hobbies or interests outside of work?
Ski. Ski. And ski, ski, ski. (I also really like to pet my cats, canoe, and cook big meals).