Joel Sholtes

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE)

This document, produced with funding from the State of Colorado Water Conservation Board, provides recommendations and guidance for Fluvial Hazard Zone mapping teams and also provides background and contextual information that may be useful for planners, community officials, and NGOs. The FHZ Protocol is intended to be a tool for a team of Qualifie...

The cover image, by Joel S. Sholtes et al., is based on the Research Article Longitudinal variability of geomorphic response to floods, https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.4472.

Riverine infrastructure provides essential services for the operation and development of the world's nations and their economies. When much of this infrastructure was built in the United States, fluvial processes and stream ecology were not well understood, putting it in conflict with and at risk from the stream environment. High maintenance costs...

Integrated modeling of mercury transformation and transport in watersheds subject to wildfire

Morphodynamic response of channels and floodplains to flooding reflects interactions of erosive and resistive forces with sediment transport capacity and supply at multiple scales. Monotonic relationships between reach‐scale response to floods with independent variables such as flood stream power and channel confinement can be confounded by longitu...

Wildfire is known to affect Hg cycling in watersheds by mobilizing volatile Hg into the atmospheric and allowing Hg to be carried off attached to sediments when mobilized by rainfall-runoff. Increases in MeHg in water, sediment, and biota have been documented as an aftermath of wildfire. Reclamation will be required to comply with new mercury TMDL...

The Colorado Front Range flood of September 2013 induced a diverse range of geomorphic changes along numerous stream corridors, providing an opportunity to assess responses to a large flood in a semiarid landscape. We defined six classes of geomorphic change related to peak unit stream power and valley confinement for 531 stream reaches over 226 km...

River regulation induces immediate and chronic changes to floodplain ecosystems. We analysed both short-term and prolonged effects of river regulation on the growth patterns of the keystone riparian tree species Fremont cottonwood (Populus deltoides ssp. wislizenii) at three upper Colorado River Basin rivers having different magnitudes of flow regu...

This presentation presents a study that assessed geomorphic change and peak flow unit stream power of streams impacted by the 2013 Colorado Front Range Flood. We developed a classification scheme for increasing levels of geomorphic adjustment and applied it to 531 reaches on 226 km of 16 impacted streams. The key variables for predicting geomorphic...

Channel morphodynamic response to a flood occurs within the context the relative magnitude of erosive and resisting forces along with sediment transport capacity and supply, all of which manifest at multiple scales. Relating channel response to floods with reach-scale metrics such as flood stream power and channel confinement can be confounded if,...

The decision to use either daily-averaged or sub-daily streamflow records has the potential to impact the calculation of sediment transport metrics and stream channel design. Using bedload and suspended load sediment transport measurements collected at 138 sites across the United States, we calculated the effective discharge, sediment yield, and ha...

The river management and restoration community has devoted much effort to predicting the bankfull discharge, Qbf, and associated channel geometry at Qbf for the purposes of channel study, classification, and design. Four types Qbf prediction methods predominate: (1) direct estimation based on field indicators of bankfull stage, (2) downstream hydra...

Theoretical approaches to magnitude-frequency analysis (MFA) of sediment transport in channels couple continuous flow probability density functions (PDFs) with power law flow-sediment transport relations (rating curves) to produce closed-form equations relating MFA metrics such as the effective discharge, Qeff, and fraction of sediment transported...

Recently, an interest has emerged in the role of aquatic biota as geomorphic agents. Although it is difficult to untangle the interconnectedness of the biotic and abiotic constituents within channel networks, a few theoretical efforts and several recent empirical studies have capitalized on this interconnectivity, providing research that narrows th...

Recently, an interest has emerged in the role of aquatic biota as geomorphic agents. Although it is difficult to untangle the interconnectedness of the biotic and abiotic constituents within channel networks, a few theoretical efforts and several recent empirical studies have capitalized on this interconnectivity, providing research that narrows th...

Stream channel restoration can increase flow storage and energy dissipation of passing flood waves. Elements of restoration design that can enhance attenuation include remeandering, which reduces channel slope and increases channel length relative to the floodplain; restoring channel-floodplain connectivity; and revegetating banks and the floodplai...

In the United States, stream restoration is an increasing part of environmental and land management programs, particularly under the auspices of compensatory mitigation regulations. Markets and regulations surrounding stream mitigation are beginning to mirror those of the well-established wetland mitigation industry. Recent studies have shown that...

Restoration of channelized or incised streams has the potential to reduce downstream flooding via storing and dissipating the energy of flood waves. Restoration design elements such as restoring meanders, reducing slope, restoring floodplain connectivity, re-introducing in-channel woody debris, and re-vegetating banks and the floodplain have the ca...

Master's Thesis