Experts

The mysteries of how water moves fuel both Lauren Lowman’s research and her imagination. Through computational modeling, geospatial analysis and field experiments, Lowman studies how changes in water availability impact overall ecosystem health, productivity and sustainability. But her observations of urban hydrology got her wondering about whether streams covered by city buildings could be considered healthy, and that led her to develop a program called the “Lost Waterways of Winston-Salem.” The program brings community stakeholders together to talk about hydrologic science, water issues, environmental issues and policy decision making. In the field, she aims to understand more about drought in the southeastern United States and how fires and weather events such as hurricanes affect the region’s water budget. You can find her and her students in the lab creating fire-resistant monitoring towers to collect data during controlled burns. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Remote Sensing and Ecological Modelling.