Evan King
Evan King is a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering whose research is focused on quantifying how mountainous watersheds control the supply of water and its quality to dependent downstream communities. Specifically, Evan investigates how landscape properties, such as topography, geology, and vegetation type, influence key hydrologic-biogeochemical processes. Evan’s current work, centered on the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, explores how subsurface structure combines with variable climate forcing to determine the distribution of water available for plant communities and streamflow levels. To conduct this analysis, she uses a combination of high-resolution remote sensing and geospatial datasets, along with field-based observations, and has used, developed, and shared numerous hydrology-focused MATLAB codes in the course of her work. Evan’s ultimate goal is to establish robust, transferable relationships between vegetation dynamics, energy, and water availability on the watershed scale. Her research has the potential to advance our understanding of mountainous watershed behaviors and enable the prediction of large-scale hydrological responses of vegetation communities in the face of a warming climate.