Small Streams, Big Impacts
In an exciting development for 2024, our colleague Dr. Birte Seffert embarks on a nationwide tour to meet with the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund Fellows across Germany. The Keeping Up with the Boost Fellows series aims to shine a spotlight on the journeys, challenges, and achievements of our Fellows.
The last (but not least) current KT Boost Fellow in North Rhine-Westphalia is hydrologist Dr. Clarissa Glaser at University of Bonn. She focuses on how small streams (in German: Bäche) exchange water with the surrounding environment (e.g., hillslopes, groundwater) and how this exchange will be affected by climate change. Clarissa is on a mission to find out.
What’s Clarissa’s Research about?
Clarissa’s research focuses on headwater streams, which make up 90% of the total length of global river networks. These small streams are incredibly dynamic and play a critical role for the water quality through natural exchange processes with the surrounding environment. However, as climate change reduces stream flow, understanding how these processes evolve is more important than ever.
To crack this mystery, Clarissa uses innovative tracer experiments. She injects salt into streams and tracks its movement downstream. By combining these field experiments with hydrological modeling, she’s uncovering how factors like river network geometry and groundwater levels influence these exchange processes. Her ultimate goal? To predict how streams exchange water under varying environmental conditions—a breakthrough that could enable us to predict stream water quality worldwide.
Clarissa hass offered some advice for early career researchers in Germany and promoted hydrology as an interesting research field:
- Embrace interdisciplinarity: Hydrology spans from math to environmental science to chemistry. Clarissa recommends: Be open to learning and integrate methods from different fields—it will strengthen your work and scientific expertise!
- Value constructive feedback: Clarissa shares that even apparent failures can be opportunities to grow. “You learn more from one piece of constructive criticism than from 500 compliments,” she says.
- Don’t underestimate small steps: Whether in research or career development, stepwise progress builds foundations for big achievement!
Clarissa’s work also shows a broader trend: the growing focus on river corridor research, which considers streams not as isolated pipes but as integrated systems connected to their surrounding environment. By deepening our understanding of processes in the river corridor, researchers like Clarissa are helping to shape sustainable solutions to global water challenges.
The KT Boost Fund is a joint program of GSO and the Klaus Tschira Foundation for postdoctoral researchers in the Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Science. It offers flexible funding for risky and interdisciplinary research on the way to academic independence. Funding can be used to hire staff, buy equipment, or build collaborations – tailored to the research project.
