UROP Project

Understanding Nutrients and Suspended Solids Influx from River to Estuary under Extreme Events-driven High Streamflow ***

Water quality, Nutrients, Streamflow, River, Estuary
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Research Mentor: Mr. Sumon Hossain Rabby, Him
Department, College, Affiliation: Civil & Environmental Engineering, FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
Contact Email: sr22bi@fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:
Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: Civil and environmental engineering, earth and environmental sciences, geographical sciences, applied mathematics and computer sciences.
Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required:
Remote or In-person: In-person
Approximate Weekly Hours: 10 hours, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:
  • Day: Friday, September 5
    Start Time: 12:00
    End Time: 12:30
    Zoom Link: https://fsu.zoom.us/j/91742399413

Project Description

Extreme events such as hurricanes and storms bring increased runoff from the watersheds to the rivers and streams. These runoffs carry key water quality pollutants such as nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) and sediments, which end up transported into and accumulated in the downstream estuarine systems and contribute to water quality related issues such as harmful algal blooms in the coastal systems. My past research has evaluated how low-flow conditions contribute to the nutrient loads into downstream estuarine systems; however, there’s a lack in understanding high-flow’s contribution in such variabilities due to limited extreme-events. This research aims to explore high-flow related variability in nutrients and sediments in river-estuarine confluences to better understand the role of extreme events- related water quality deterioration and impairment. The research supports effective restoration plans for estuarine water systems and protects healthy ones from water-ecological pitfalls.

Research Tasks: 1) Collect and process existing streamflow and water quality (i.e., nutrients, total suspended solids, etc.) data for various pollutants across the United States from publicly available data sources (e.g., United States Geological Survey, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, etc.).
2) Execute existing codes to analyze standardized streamflow index (SSI) to characterize high flow events and alternatively perform baseflow separation to separate runoff from the streamflow data and analyze standardize runoff index (SRI).
3) Perform various statistical tests on the water quality data together with SSI and SRI.

Skills that research assistant(s) may need: Required skills are being self-motivated and experienced with online data acquisition, processing via Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and basic programming for statistical tests. The preferred skills are programming in R or Python.

Mentoring Philosophy

I am always available to help my students and envision the relationship beyond doing certain tasks for a research project and try to help students flourish in their career. I highly value the knowledge and skills they receive through my mentorship. I'm open to provide hands-on training to my students on the technical works, when needed. My core mentoring principles include: (1) encourage creativity and critical thinking by motivating students to think beyond conventional approaches; (2) establish clear expectations by preparing a well-defined set of tasks and deliverables to ensure students understand their responsibilities and objectives; (3) maintain open communication through frequent discussions, actively listening to students’ concerns, and proactively addressing any barriers they may encounter; (4) promote transparency and ethical standards by fostering an environment where openness is valued, and students feel comfortable acknowledging and learning from mistakes.

Additional Information

I have recently co-mentored two undergraduate students through NSF-REU, gave them training on programming from the scratch, guided them through the subject matters and provided feedback regularly, and their research has been commended during poster presentations. This has motivated me to mentor more students and help students achieve new knowledge and skills.

Link to Publications

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zthhuWUAAAAJ&hl=en
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