Where Restoration Meets the Road
Ceara Parks Oliver, a PhD student in the lab of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Professor John Schwartz, didn’t always see herself as an engineer.
“In Pittsburgh, where I grew up, the rivers, bridges, and tunnels were a constant reminder of engineering at work,” she said, “and my parents definitely encouraged my scientific curiosity. But I had never thought of myself as smart enough in math or science to pursue a career in engineering.”
Then, just as Parks Oliver began preparing to apply for colleges, the 2008 Recession started. Suddenly, the stability offered by an engineering career outweighed any doubts about her math skills.
While she initially committed to engineering for its stability, she soon discovered a deeper sense of purpose. Compelled by the opportunity to improve people’s lives through the infrastructure they relied on every day, she majored in civil engineering. She went on to spend nearly a decade in the transportation industry, where she specialized in designing stormwater infrastructure.
Now, Parks Oliver has found a new way to improve people’s lives and the environment through her doctoral research. Drawing on her years of industry expertise, she is working to help engineers and scientists manage both stream restoration and stormwater management in a way that contributes to a watershed’s overall health.
“The Drainage Queen”
Though she struggled with math in her engineering classes at the University of Oklahoma, Parks Oliver found that she had a knack for solving problems creatively. She often helped her friends think about equations in different ways that enhanced their understanding.
“I’m still not a naturally great math person, but I have learned that you don’t have to be great at math to be a great engineer,” she reflected.
After graduating in 2013, Parks Oliver began working for Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering, and construction firm in Texas, where she stayed for nearly 10 years. One of her first assignments was to design stormwater infrastructure (routing and drainage) for a roundabout project located in historic McKinney, Texas.
How did a new employee land that responsibility?
Nobody else wanted to take it on.
“Drainage design is different every time, which drives most engineers crazy,” Parks Oliver explained. “Not many want to work in stormwater because there’s typically no single ‘right’ answer. But that is actually what excited me the most. I guess I’m the right kind of crazy.”
As in her college math classes, Parks Oliver enjoyed finding creative solutions to water transportation problems. She quickly became the office’s go-to stormwater engineer, earning the nickname “The Drainage Queen.” Her designs were informed by analyzing the interaction between proposed transportation designs and water’s natural flow.
She also worked alongside environmental scientists to measure a design’s potential impacts to the local watershed—an important part of compensatory mitigation, a challenging regulatory process to restore streams after permanent impacts such as constructing culverts (waterways constructed under roads) or relocating a stream.
“When you’re building roadways and bridges, you need to avoid or minimize negative impacts to aquatic resources such as wetlands and streams,” Parks Oliver explained. “When you can’t, you need to mitigate for them by compensating for them elsewhere in the watershed.”
Although she enjoyed the challenge of stormwater designs, Parks Oliver also longed to move past calculating impacts, contributing to mitigation from the solutions side.
A Process-Based Framework
Parks Oliver started pursuing that dream when she joined Schwartz’s lab in the fall of 2022.
“Dr. Schwartz gave me a very unique opportunity to pick what I wanted to focus on for my thesis and dissertation,” Parks Oliver said, “so I’m developing a framework for compensatory mitigation that integrates stormwater management strategies with stream restoration. Appropriate stormwater management is vital to preventing ‘urban stream syndrome,’ or the consistent impairment of streams due to urbanizing watersheds.”
In urban environments, high volumes of stormwater runoff into streams can cause negative impacts like significant bank erosion and transportation of urban pollutants. The continual degradation, sedimentation, and pollution ultimately undermine a watershed’s physical and ecological stability.
Since about 68 percent of Tennesseans rely on surface waters like streams and reservoirs for their drinking water, urban stream syndrome can also threaten human health.
To start repairing the damage, Parks Oliver is taking what she calls a watershed-based approach—looking at hydrology, sediment transport, ecological interactions, and the other processes that coalesce to shape a stream. Her framework also emphasizes biological integrity, drawing on metrics such as the Tennessee Macroinvertebrate Index, a score the state government uses to assess whether a waterway is impaired (in need of restoration and mitigation).
“I’m a civil engineer, not a biologist, so some of this is out of my comfort zone. But I’ve realized that stream restoration is a multidisciplinary field that touches on all aspects of water,” Parks Oliver said. “Eventually, I hope engineers and scientists can use my system to work with the watershed, ensuring that stormwater management and land stewardship work together.”
Contact
Izzie Gall (egall4@utk.edu)