Local Haze Blog Features Christine Hatch Wetland Monitoring Project
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Christine Hatch—an extension professor in the College of Natural Sciences’s Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences and an associate director for academics at iCons—was featured on the Local Haze blog for her work in advancing our understanding of wetland restoration through research into the connections between surface water and groundwater.
While working as a member of Living Observatory, a nonprofit collaborative that brings together scientists, technologists, artists, and restoration practitioners to study and document the ecological recovery of retired cranberry bogs, Hatch has investigated how water moves through restored landscapes. This specific project has been titled “The Hydrologic Understory”:
“For ‘The Hydrologic Understory,’ Christine Hatch…was interested in studying the processes and transitions that occur at the interfaces between streams (surface water) and underground reservoirs (groundwater aquifers). For this project, she deployed a weather station to log precipitation, drone imagery to visualize upwellings of groundwater, and Distributed Temperature Sensing: DTS (multiple fiber-optic cables) to track heat by which she could infer soil moisture at Foothills Preserve, the western portion of Tidmarsh Farms that would undergo restoration in 2020, four years after Tidmarsh.”
— Local Haze
The blog post shares pictures from Foothills Preserve in Plymouth, MA, where Hatch and her team used weather stations, drone imagery, and fiber-optic cables to monitor precipitation, groundwater movement, and soil moisture ahead of a major restoration project.
Read more on the Local Haze blog.