IU Hydrologist Lands NSF Grant
The National Science Foundation has awarded a more than $620,000 grant to Indiana University hydrologist Darren Ficklin. The grant will help fund a collaborative project which aims to develop a data set of conditions in streams and rivers throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Ficklin is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at IU’s Bloomington campus. He is one of three principal investigators for the project, which will create HydroClim, a data set that will be able to provide monthly predictions of stream flow and water temperature.
"It’s a large computational project that will make use of IU’s Big Red II supercomputer to do the data crunching," said Ficklin. "It will provide not only current data but also projections, so we can anticipate how fish might react in the future if there is less stream flow, higher water temperatures and so on."
IU says HydroClim will be the "first data set of North American freshwater resources of this scope and resolution." It will be integrated with another data set called FishNet 2, which charts the location of fish species in North American rivers and streams.
Ficklin says HydroClim will be able to provide valuable information that can be used by researchers, natural resource management professionals, government agencies and the general public. The university says the data and research will be made available for free.