CEE doctoral candidate Christos Giannopoulos recently received the Excellent Scientists Award (ESA) for the Best Paper as part of the Protection and Restoration of the Environment XV conference in Patras, Greece.
His research is with the Intensively Managed Landscapes Critical Zone Observatory project that is funded by the National Science Foundation.
The award-winning paper he submitted, “Hillslope geomorphologic and hydrodynamic dispersion: Implications for propagation and filtering of runoff signals” looks at soil erosion and sediment transport processes at the catchment scale, with a focus on catchment geomorphology and watershed dynamics in Intensively Managed Landscapes, such as those of the US Midwest and Southeast.
Giannopoulos says he is very honored to have received the award and looks forward to the opportunity to share his research with other researchers, farmers, and stakeholders to address the current and imminent issues that Intensively Managed Landscapes are facing due to anthropogenic disturbance.
“The ultimate goal of my research is to develop tools for the effective implementation and assessment of Best Management Practices at watersheds,” he said. “It’s a step towards next-generation, multi-scale, spatially-distributed watershed models that can aid farmers and stakeholders, make decisions that can optimize food or energy production, and mitigate both on-site and off-site impacts related to soil quality degradation, stream impairment, and excessive nutrient and sediment loads.”
The conference, which had to cancel in-person activities due to the pandemic, was organized by the Stevens Institute of Technology in the US and the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Patras, Greece. It started as an effort to foster and promote scientific cooperation amongst Greek and Greek-descent scientists living both in Greece and abroad by KRIKOS, a scientific and cultural organization headquartered in New York.