Branson Field Laboratory

  Red Canyon Creek Project

Investigating Arid Zone Hydrologic Systems at the Local Riparian to Regional Bedrock Scale:  Multidisciplinary Instruction Through Data Analysis at the University of Missouri's Branson Field Camp

(Click here to view the poster presentation as a PDF file on your browser)

Robert Bauer*, Donald Siegel**, Laura Lautz**, Dennis Dahms***, Eric Sandvol*, James Luepke* and Len Payne*
*Department of Geological Sciences, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211
**Department of Earth Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244
***Department of Geography, Northern Iowa University, Cedar Fall, IA 50614.

            During the past four years at the Branson Field Laboratory, we have developed projects that integrate a broad range of hydrologic, hydrogeologic, and geochemical skills with field mapping and shallow subsurface analysis.  Our educational philosophy is to introduce our students to a broad range of skills and methods within the context of continually changing discovery.   Each year's work is conditioned on the results of the previous year's results; students are involved in new inquiry-based research every year.
            The study area, a riparian wetland research area managed by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming, is located in scenic Red Canyon, near Lander, Wyoming.  The canyon is drained by the now underfit Red Canyon Creek.  Five alluvial units adjacent to the creek include four Pleistocene cut terraces through Triassic red beds and one Holocene fill terrace.  The creek has a series of beaver dams within tight meanders.  The study project involves four segments of data collection and analysis: 1) mapping of the alluvial terraces, 2) installing and monitoring shallow test wells using a Geoprobe^®, 3) conducting in-stream tracer tests, and 4) obtaining shallow seismic refraction profiles.
            Students and faculty participate in an integrated effort to characterize hydrologic relationships within a well defined stretch of Red Canyon Creek.  In two of the meanders, borings into fine-grained floodplain deposits are collected and analyzed, and piezometers or water table wells are installed.  Stratigraphic data, water levels in piezometers and wells, and all-day in-stream tracer testing have identified a wetland hyporheic zone with short-term flow paths to and from the water table and the stream. Seismic refraction profiles suggest that there are buried stream channels and point bars beneath the surficial silt that may produce locally complex short-term flow paths.  Next year we will use high resolution seismic reflection profiles and selected new monitoring wells to test this hypothesis.
            Our presentation illustrates data collected by the students and how these data are used to develop and test both hydrologic and geologic hypotheses.