Jonathan Czuba, P.E.

Program Focus

Dr. Czuba's research program extends collaboratively across multiple disciplines to advance the understanding of riverine ecosystems and their response to human and natural forces. The challenge to provide water, food, and energy for a growing population in the context of climate change is and will continue to place increasing pressure on riverine ecosystems. Dr. Czuba's research group incorporates theory, modeling, and field measurements to improve our understanding of these complex systems and better inform river management. Dr. Czuba's research largely focuses on the development and application of modeling tools to better predict the transport and fate of sediment and nutrients in rivers, organized around three major themes:

(1) Understanding the fundamentals of stream and floodplain restoration, specifically quantifying the form and function of natural streams and floodplains to inform stream restoration efforts.

(2) River network modeling and connectivity, specifically modeling the transport of sediment and nutrients on the branching structure of a river network to determine how change at one location on the landscape manifests change at locations downstream and to inform river basin management.

(3) Ecohydraulics and ecomorphodynamics (eco-: ecosystem + -hydraulics: dynamics of flowing water; -morphodynamics: evolution of landforms in response to the erosion and deposition of sediment), specifically how flowing water and moving sediment affect and are affected by the living components of the riverine ecosystem (e.g., plants, fish, freshwater mussels) to inform aquatic ecosystem management and restoration.

Selected Recent Publications

Czuba, J.A., M. Hirschler, E.A. Pratt, A. Villamagna, and P. Angermeier (2021), Bankfull shear velocity predicts embeddedness and silt cover in gravel streambeds, River Research and Applications, Accepted, doi:10.1002/rra.3878.

Ahammad, M., J.A. Czuba, A. Pfeiffer, B.P. Murphy, and P. Belmont (2021), Simulated dynamics of mixed versus uniform grain size sediment pulses in a gravel-bedded river, Journal of Geophysical Research – Earth Surface, 126(10), e2021JF006194, doi:10.1029/2021JF006194.

Hansen, A.T., T. Campbell, S.J. Cho, J.A. Czuba, B.J. Dalzell, C.L. Dolph, P.L. Hawthorne, S. Rabotyagov, Z. Lang, K. Kumarasamy, P. Belmont, J.C. Finlay, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, K.B. Gran, C.L. Kling, and P. Wilcock (2021), Integrated assessment modeling reveals near-channel management as cost-effective to improve water quality in agricultural watersheds, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A., 118(28), e2024912118, doi:10.1073/pnas.2024912118.

Sumaiya, S., J.A. Czuba, J.T. Schubert, S.R. David, G.H. Johnston, and D.A. Edmonds (2021), Sediment transport potential in a hydraulically connected river and floodplain-channel system, Water Resources Research, 57(5), e2020WR028852, doi:10.1029/2020WR028852.

Pfeiffer, A.M., K.R. Barnhart, J.A. Czuba, and E.W.H. Hutton (2020), NetworkSedimentTransporter: A Landlab component for bed material transport through river networks, Journal of Open Source Software, 5(53), 2341, doi:10.21105/joss.02341.

Christensen, N.D., C.E. Wisinger, L.A. Maynard, N. Chauhan, J.T. Schubert, J.A. Czuba, and J.R. Barone (2020), Transport and characterization of microplastics in inland waterways, Journal of Water Process Engineering, 38, 101640, doi:10.1016/j.jwpe.2020.101640.

Murphy, B.P., J.A. Czuba, and P. Belmont (2019), Post-wildfire sediment cascades: a modeling framework linking debris flow generation and network-scale sediment routing, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, 44(11), 2126-2140, doi:10.1002/esp.4635.