Scott N. Miller

• PhD in Watershed Management
• Professor at University of Wyoming

Integrated modeling of headwater watersheds in mountain environments is often limited by the lack of hydrological characterization and monitoring data. For the No-Name watershed in the Medicine Bow Mountains in Wyoming (USA), this research integrates regional surface and subsurface hydrological and geophysical measurements to create three-dimension...

Agricultural water is of considerable interest to water managers and policymakers as irrigation—particularly flood irrigation—accounts for the largest portion of freshwater use. However, characterization of how and when flood applied water contributes to storage and adjacent surface water bodies via return flow remains limited, particularly relativ...

The utility of a particular tracer to perform hydrograph separations depends on the dominant watershed properties combined with meteorological patterns; therefore, drawing conclusions from one tracer can be misleading. Combining information from multiple tracers can reveal complimentary insights that advance our knowledge of runoff generating proce...

In this study, we characterize the snowmelt hydrological response of nine headwater watersheds in southeast Wyoming by separating streamflow into three components using a combination of tracer and graphical approaches. First, continuous 15‐min records of specific conductance (SC) from 2016 to 2018 were used to separate streamflow into annual contri...

In this study, we characterize the snowmelt hydrological response of nine nested headwater watersheds in southeast Wyoming by separating streamflow into three components using a combination of tracer and graphical approaches. First, continuous records of specific conductance (SC) from 2016 to 2018 were used to separate streamflow into direct runoff...

The assessment of hydrologic ecosystem services associated with flood irrigation in the western United States is particularly limited by a lack of data about return flows. Return flows, the portion of applied water that returns to adjacent surface and groundwater hydrologic systems during flood irrigation, may provide wildlife habitat, recharge aqu...

Automation in baseflow separation procedures allowed fast and convenient baseflow and baseflow index (BF and BFI) estimation for studies including multiple watersheds and covering large spatio‐temporal scales. While most of the existing algorithms are developed and tested extensively for rainfall‐ and baseflow‐dominated systems, little attention is...

Several historic isotope hydrograph separation (IHS) studies indicate pre-event water dominates runoff events; however, most of these studies were conducted in humid climates where soil moisture is relatively high throughout the year. In snowmelt-dominated watersheds located in seasonally arid climates, the subsurface has months to drain remaining...

Cutthroat flumes are widely used in field projects to estimate discharge via a stage-discharge relationship. Flumes are commonly tested and calibrated in a laboratory to develop the stage-discharge relationship, but field installations often occur under non-idealized conditions, specifically with respect to bed slope. We calibrated a cutthroat flum...

See details at: http://water-research.info/scicomm/posters/agu17/

Hydrograph separation is useful for determining sources of runoff and how volumes vary over time. A simple graphical separation technique for quickflow is designed to allow for inter-watershed and inter-regional comparison. Several automated techniques already exist (e.g. HYSEP, PART, RORA), but these programs use daily mean data and poorly perform...

Understanding the capture and redistribution of water within ecological sites should improve our understanding of the function of rangeland watersheds. We compare ecological site physical properties, runoff events, and precipitation event characteristics to assess the variability in hydrologic response of four ecological sites to natural rainfall e...

Habitat suitability analysis is complex and requires integration of multiple attributes at a range of spatial scales. We use fine-and broad-scale variables within a spatial modelling framework to determine the suitability of greater sage-grouse nesting habitat using fuzzy logic. Fuzzy theory allows for a landscape component to have full, partial, o...

For more details see: http://water-research.info/scicomm/posters/agu2016/

Natural diurnal fluctuations in discharge are common in many types of streams and scales for different reasons (i.e. snowmelt, evapotranspiration, infiltration, precipitation). Scientific literature has placed relatively little consideration on the role diurnal cycles as they may appear insignificant from a water management point of view; however,...

A time series algorithm was being presented that classifies vegetation in the Njoro Watershed, Kenya, according to the shapes of temporal normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) profiles representing growing cycles for different vegetation. We present a two-step approach that includes noise reduction using discrete Fourier filtering and a clu...

More information (+ abstract) available at: http://water-research.info/cuahsi-2016-1/

Abstracts from SAGEEP 2016

Return flow is an important part of the water balance in semi-arid areas that rely on flood irrigation. We examine return flow processes from irrigated fields to streams, which can occur via different pathways: overland flow, near-surface return flow and via pathways below the vadose zone. The primary question to be addressed is how these different...

Spatial and temporal distribution of water flow paths in a high-mountain headwater (the ”NoName watershed”) in the Snowy Range are assessed using a parallel high performance integrated hydrologic model Parflow which simulates both surface and subsurface flow and their exchanges. The land surface of the model is defined by high resolution Lidar data...

The water balance in alpine watersheds is dominated by snowmelt, which provides infiltration, recharges aquifers, controls peak runoff, and is responsible for most of the annual water flow downstream. Accurate estimation of snow water equivalent (SWE) is necessary for runoff and flood estimation, but acquiring enough measurements is challenging due...

In the Western United States, more than 3 million hectares of lodgepole pine forests have been impacted by the Mountain pine beetle outbreak, while another 166,000 hectares of spruce-fir forests have been attacked by Spruce beetle. Following the beetle attack, the trees lose their hydraulic conductivity thus altering their carbon and water fluxes....

Conserving a declining species that is facing many threats, including overlap of its habitats with energy extraction activities, depends upon identifying and prioritizing the value of the habitats that remain. In addition, habitat quality is often compromised when source habitats are lost or fragmented due to anthropogenic development. Our objectiv...

While valley glaciers have received considerable attention for their contributions to summer runoff during the past decade, the contributions of rock glaciers to summer runoff patterns have largely been ignored, especially in the western United States. This article examines summer runoff from two basins in the La Sal Mountains, Utah: the non rock g...

Global energy demand is predicted to increase dramatically, suggesting the need to understand the role of disturbance from energy development better and to develop more efficient conservation strategies for affected wildlife populations. We evaluated elk (Cervus elaphus) response to disturbance associated with natural gas development in summer and...

Potential data sets for landcover classification, such as Landsat (or pre-processed data such as the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD)), are often too coarse for fine-scale research needs or are cost-prohibitive (Quickbird, Ikonos and Geoeye). Repeated attempts at classifying high spatial resolution data, National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAI...

Channel morphology characteristics play a crucial role in the understanding and interpretation of a region's geomorphic and hydrologic processes and are important inputs to physically-based distributed runoff and erosion models. Conventional survey techniques for determining channel width, depth and cross-section area are time consuming and may not...

A geographical information systems model that identifies regions of the United States of America (USA) susceptible to West Nile virus (WNV) transmission risk is presented. This system has previously been calibrated and tested in the western USA; in this paper we use datasets of WNV-killed birds from South Carolina and Connecticut to test the model...

A degree-day (DD) model of West Nile virus capable of forecasting real-time transmission risk in the continental United States of America up to one week in advance using a 50-km grid is available online at https://sites. google.com/site/arbovirusmap/. Daily averages of historical risk based on temperatures for 1994-2003 are available at 10km resolu...

Background/Question/Methods Land managers and scientists studying rangeland watershed scale responses to changes in climate and management need watershed hydrologic models capable of accurately representing these heterogeneous systems. Currently, hydrologic models do not incorporate ecological sites, which are units of land classification, accept...

The rapid spread of West Nile virus across North America after its introduction in 1999 highlights the potential for foreign arboviruses to become established in the United States of America. Of particular concern is Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV), which has been responsible for multiple African epidemics resulting in death of both humans and lives...

Greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) are threatened by loss of sagebrush habitat and the spread of West Nile virus throughout much of their range in North America; yet, future impacts of climate change on these potential stressors have not been addressed. Here, we aim to quantify the potential impacts of climate change on the distributio...

The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) is an ArcGIS interface to support data organization, model parameterization, integration, and visualization for KINEROS2, RHEM, and the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. All of the required initial modeling parameters automatically are generated by AGWA from topography, soils, and land cov...

A spatially explicit degree-day model was used to evaluate the risk of Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) transmission by mosquitoes to humans and livestock within five target states in the continental United States: California, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, and Texas. A geographic information system was used to model potential virus transmission base...

The dynamics of granitic landscapes are modulated by bimodal weathering, which produces patchy granular soils and expanses of bare rock ranging from meter-scale boulders to mountain-scale domes. We used terrain analysis and with cosmogenic nuclide measurements of erosion rates to quantitatively explore Wahrhaftig’s decades-old hypothesis for the de...

Understanding the spatial distribution of population across a landscape is important in land use planning. In developing nations, where resources are limited, such information can facilitate more efficient decision-making for resource allocations. This article examines three methods for characterizing the distribution of human population within a n...

The dynamics of granitic landscapes are regulated, in part, by bimodal weathering, which produces granular soils and expanses of bare rock ranging from meter-scale boulders to mountain-scale domes. Conceptual models for the evolution of granitic landscapes date back to Gilbert and Penck. Yet few studies have been able to realistically predict the c...

Topography and land cover characteristics can have significant effects on infiltration, runoff, and erosion processes on watersheds. The ability to model the timing and routing of surface water and erosion is affected by the resolution of the digital elevation model (DEM). High resolution ground-based Light Detecting and Ranging (LiDAR) technology...

KINEROS originated in the 1970's as a distributed event-based rainfall-runoff erosion model. A unique feature at that time was its interactive coupling of a finite difference approximation of the kinematic overland flow equations to the Smith-Parlange infiltration model. Development and improvement of KINEROS has continued for a variety of projects...

Rapid land cover and land use changes occurring in Kenya's Rift Valley are implicated in changes in hydrologic response in the River Njoro watershed. This watershed is a critical contributor of runoff to Lake Nakuru National Park, an internationally recognized wetlands area. Three Landsat TM remote sensing images representing a 17-year period (1986...

Coalbed Natural Gas extraction usually results in the production of excess, or product, water, necessitating a strategy for disposal and minimizing landscape and habitat impacts. In the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, product water is either discharged into ephemeral streams or retention/detention ponds. Monitoring these water bodies is important fo...

A geographic information system model designed to identify regions at risk for West Nile virus (WNV) transmission was calibrated and tested with data collected in Santa Clara County, California. American Crows that died from WNV infection in 2005 provided spatial and temporal ground truth. When the model was run with parameters based on Culex tarsa...

Increased awareness of complex interactions among humans, their environment, and potential land management decisions has created a demand for integrated multidisciplinary decision support tools within a spatial framework. We have created the Spatial Environmental and Agricultural Decision Support tool (SEADS), which incorporates biophysical and eco...

Considerable land cover changes have occurred in the Luvuvhu catchment in northeastern South Africa in the past two decades. These changes are associated with human population growth and may be contributing to observed reductions in winter river baseflows and increased episodes of river drying within Kruger National Park. Six-class land cover maps...

Spatial and seasonal variations of phytoplankton, expressed in terms of species composition, cell density, biovolumes and biomass, collected at 10 sampling sites in alkaline–saline Lake Nakuru, Kenya, were investigated monthly from March 2004 to February 2005, in relation to selected physical and chemical water quality parameters. A total of eight...

The geographic information systems (GIS) database complementing the Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed (WGEW) special section papers in this issue of Water Resources Research is described. Spatial data layers discussed here will be especially useful to modelers interested in simulating the spatial and temporal characteristics of rainfall, runoff,...

Lake Nakuru National Park was created in 1968. In 1987, as local human population pressures increased, an electric fence was erected around the park. Lake Nakuru Basin has undergone extensive and rapid land cover and land use change, including significant upland forest losses resulting in changes to the timing and amount of flow reaching the Park f...

A demand has surfaced for tools that incorporate the economic and social/cultural constraints into natural resources management and decision making. A Multiple Objective Spatial Decision Support System (MOSDSS) appropriate for land management planning decisions in East Africa has been developed. This MOSDSS accounts for complex interactions among h...

Pan-sharpened Landsat imagery was used to map waterbodies of a wide variety of sizes in the Powder River Basin (PRB) in northcentral Wyoming, USA. Coal bed natural gas extraction activities have been intensive in the PRB over the past decade, with abundant co-produced water being discharged into retention ponds and small ephemeral channels. Althoug...

A toolkit for distributed hydrologic modeling at multiple scales using two independent models within a geographic information system is presented. This open-source, freely available software was developed through a collaborative endeavor involving two Universities and two government agencies. Called the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment too...

INTRODUCTION This chapter describes the conceptual model, mathematical model, and numerical methods underpinning the Kinematic Runoff and Erosion Model, KINEROS2. The performance of KINEROS2 and its numerous components has been evaluated in numerous studies, which were described in detail by Smith et al. (1995a). Here we provide an overview of the...

  A stochastic, spatially explicit method for assessing the impact of land cover classification error on distributed hydrologic modeling is presented. One-hundred land cover realizations were created by systematically altering the North American Landscape Characterization land cover data according to the dataset’s misclassification matrix. The matr...

A study was conducted in the upper reaches of the River Njoro watershed to test the impacts of changing land-use patterns, from predominantly forest to pasture and agriculture, on benthic macroinvertebrate communities. Stream sampling sites were chosen to correspond to the main offstream land uses, including forests, grazing, small-scale agricultur...

Data from 10 sampling sites along the River Njoro are used to examine the contribution of nutrients from upstream land uses draining each of the sampling sites. The data also are used to assess whether both the proportion of land uses and the size of the subwatersheds account for the variability in water quality in the River Njoro watershed. Geogra...

The authors developed a monitoring and risk mapping system using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) times series data derived from the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) instrument on polar orbiting national oceanographic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) satellites to map areas with a potential for a Rift Valley fever...

West Nile virus (Flaviviridae: Flavivirus) is a serious infectious disease that recently spread across the North America continent. A spatial analysis tool was developed on the ArcMap 9.x platform to estimate potential West Nile virus activity using a spatially explicit degree-day model. The model identifies when the virus Extrinsic Incubation Peri...

Water disposal methods such as pond storage and in-channel releases that are associated with coalbed natural gas production (CBNG) have increased the amount of standing water in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming. These standing waters have been shown to be potential larval habitats for the Culex tarsalis mosquito, the primary vector of West Nile Viru...

Kenya's Rift Valley has been undergoing rapid land cover change for the past two decades, which has resulted in ecological and hydrological changes. An effort is under way to quantify the timing and rate of these changes in and around the River Njoro watershed located near the towns of Njoro and Nakuru using remote sensing and geographic informatio...

Water disposal methods such as pond storage and in-channel releases that are associated with coalbed natural gas production (CBNG) have increased the amount of standing water in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming. These standing waters have been shown to be potential larval habitats for the Culex tarsalis mosquito, the primary vector of West Nile Viru...

Variations in soil profi le thickness, surface soil properties, erosion rates, runoff, and sediment properties within similar soils and watersheds are controlled by slope factors such as steepness, length, and position through their infl uence on soil water regimes, and thus soil erodibility. This study was conducted to determine the effects of slo...

A spatial decision support system is proposed for use in the River Njoro experimental watershed in Kenya that is appropriate for land management planning decisions in East Africa. This system incorporates biophysical and economic models into a single user interface. Spatial and nonspatial data will be integrated into a spatially and temporally dist...

A toolkit for distributed hydrologic modeling at multiple scales using two independent models within a geographic information system is presented. This open-source, freely available software was developed through a collaborative endeavor involving two Universities and two government agencies. Called the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment too...

Potential larval habitats of the mosquito Culex tarsalis (Coquillett), implicated as a primary vector of West Nile virus in Wyoming, were identified using integrated remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) analyses. The study area is in the Powder River Basin of north central Wyoming, an area that has been undergoing a significant in...

In the marginally productive rangelands of the semiarid, southwestern USA, the maintenance of organic C (OC) is essential to the stability of the ecosystem. This study was conducted to identify landscape factors responsible for the distribution of OC in watershed soils, its loss from upland areas and subsequent transport within the stream system of...

The rift valley lakes and their associated watersheds are home for millions of resident and migratory waterfowl. However, they have been recently challenged by land use changes. Lake Nakuru supports diverse biological resources of global, regional and national importance. It is saline and River Njoro is its main source of freshwater. Deforestation,...

This study will improve error understanding in classified remotely sensed imagery by combining Monte Carlo and cellular automaton techniques to propagate classification errors through a hydrologic simulation model using a Geographic Information System (GIS). Land cover data derived from Landsat imagery is a critical input to physically based distri...

The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA, see: www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa) tool is a GIS interface jointly developed by the USDA-Agricultural Research Service, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the University of Arizona, and the University of Wyoming to automate the parameterization and execution of the Soil Water Assessment Tool...

Kenya’s Rift Valley has been undergoing rapid land cover change for the past two decades, which has resulted in ecological and hydrological changes within the region. An effort is underway to quantify the timing and rate of these changes in an experimental watershed near the towns of Njoro and Nakuru using remote sensing and geographic information...

Rapid post -fire watershed assessment to identify potential trouble spots for erosion and flooding can potentially aid land managers and Bu rned Area Emergency Rehabilitation (BAER) teams in deploying mitigation and rehabilitation resources. These decisions are inherently complex and spatial in nature and require a distributed hydrological modeling...

This paper presents a preliminary study of the Water Evaluation And Planning System (WEAP) as a decision support tool (DST) for local stakeholders and communities in addressing shared water issues in the River Njoro watershed. Located in the semi-arid Rift Valley of Kenya, the watershed includes important downstream habitat at Lake Nakuru, a large...

Introduction Soil erosion and surface runoff are consequences of integration of several factors and processes within a catchment. The use of a rainfall simulator and run off plots provides a valuable research tool and are often used in soil erosion and surface runoff studies. Cheruiyot (1984) used this approach to study infiltration rates and sedim...

Introduction Water resources within the River Njoro watershed have become degraded due to high population growth rate and change in land use upsetting environmental stability. Land cover classification using Landsat images (Baldyga et al., 2004) shows loss of about 20% of forested areas between 1986 and 2003 in the watershed. The forested and large...

Institutional, environmental, and economic factors are affecting water quality and quantity within the River Njoro, a major tributary to Lake Nakuru. Between 1979 and 1999, the population within the Njoro watershed greatly increased, from 270,912 people to 413,698 spurring large-scale land use change and increased pressure on watershed resources. I...

Ephemeral channel transmission loss represents an important groundwater-surface water exchange in arid and semiarid regions and is potentially a significant source of recharge at the basin scale. However, identification of the processes and dynamics that control this exchange is a challenging problem. Specifically, data on the proportion of runoff...

The Njoro Watershed, typical of the semi-arid basins in the Rift Valley of Kenya, is undergoing a new phase of rapid land use change in the uplands portion of the watershed, and on-going significant growth in both rural and urban populations. Considerable negative environmental impacts are occurring, in particular to the quantity and quality of riv...