Assistant Professor
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering
Todd Walter specializes in hydrology. He holds a PhD in engineering science (Washington State University, 1995) and an MEng in civil and environmental engineering (Cornell, 1991).
“The ultimate goal of my work as an engineer is to develop interfaces between human society and the rest of the environment that utilize and recognize natural processes in ways that are more sustainable,” Walter says.
He is most interested in exploring the common ground between hydrology and ecosystem science and discovering analytical descriptions of processes and systems.
“Water is typically a primary control on biological and biogeochemical processes. As a hydrologist, my specialization is understanding how water is distributed across and routed through landscapes,” he says. “One of my goals is to link our relatively analytical understanding of hydrology with our somewhat more empirical descriptions of microecology and environmental chemistry to answer questions about chemical fate and transport in landscapes.”
Some of his current projects are:
- understanding the interactions between landscape hydrology and microecology in controlling phosphorus transport to streams.
- using nanotechnology to develop hydrological tracers that will help overcome the “nonpoint problem” with nonpoint source pollution by linking disperse pollutant sources with specific flowpaths between the landscape and rivers.
- combining environmental fluid mechanics and novel tracers to measure methane generation in wetlands without disturbing the fragile plant-soil relationship.
- modeling hydrological and biogeochemical processes in a virtually undisturbed, unpolluted watershed in Southern Chile.
- using experiments at lab and field scales to test mechanistic mathematical models of raindrop impact affects on soil erosion, urban washoff, and chemical transport.
- developing point-and-click Internet-mapping tools for locating areas in the landscape that are susceptible to generating overland flow.
Walter teaches Watershed Engineering (BEE 473) and is developing a graduate course, The Watershed and the Ecosystem, a problem-solving and journal-oriented course in which students tackle timely environmental questions.
Having been on the faculty of universities in Montana and Alaska, Walter says that he acutely recognize that the important hydrological processes of the northeastern United States are not necessarily those of other parts of the world and that there are very few, if any, universal solutions.
“I want my students to have a certain sense of humility and recognize, for example, that the farmer who has spent every day looking at his land probably has more insights to offer us than we him,” he says. “Few things stymie progress in environmental protection more than the arrogance of those who feel they have all the answers.”
