| Douglas J. Faulkner
Associate Professor of Geography E-mail: faulkndj@uwec.edu
Education
Courses Taught at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Research Interests The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is the designated Center of Excellence in the UW System for faculty/student research collaboration. I am strongly committed to its mission of promoting undergraduate research. My research with undergraduates has included work building upon the research I did for my dissertation in the early 1990s, which focused on post Euro-American channel changes and floodplain sedimentation in the lower Buffalo River watershed of west-central Wisconsin. The primary objective of that research was to quantify recent channel and floodplain changes in order to determine whether channel erosion was a significant source of sediment from the Buffalo River watershed to the Mississippi River. For this research, my undergraduate collaborator, Tobi Rutten (Geography, 2002), received a first-place award for her work at the annual UWEC Student Research Day poster session in 2002. The main focus of my current collaborative research with students is the Lower Chippewa River Valley in west-central Wisconsin, a fascinating and unique region that was designated a State Natural Area by the Governor and the Natural Resources Board of Wisconsin in 2001. One of my collaborative research projects aims to reconstruct channel changes that have occurred along the Lower Chippewa over the past century and to identify the factors that control why certain reaches of the river have been more morphologically dynamic than others. Another project seeks to reconstruct the Late Quaternary geomorphic history (both fluvial and eolian) of the Lower Chippewa valley. (Go here for a website on Lower Chippewa research developed by undergraduate researcher Phil Larson (Geography, 2008): http://www.uwec.edu/jolhm/Student_Research/Larson/LowerChippewaRiverStudy.html.) Another research focus (though presently a latent one) is the Holocene history of sediment delivery in small watersheds in the central Great Plains. The specific focus of my work is on alluvial fans in the Platte River valley of south-central Nebraska and on the buried soils they contain, which provide a means for deciphering chronologies of watershed sediment yield and for determining past changes of the Platte River. (To view a map of my study area, click here. In addition, I am interested in the Holocene alluvial history of the Platte River, the largest river in the central Great Plains and the largest tributary of the Missouri River. Recent
Publications Faulkner, D.J. 1998. "Spatially Variable Historical Alluviation and Channel Incision in West-Central Wisconsin." Annals, Association of American Geographers 88: 666-685. Faulkner, D.J. 1996. "Field Guide – Brush Creek: Urban Menace or Asset?" In: Papers and Proceeding of the Applied Geography Conferences (Volume 19), F.A. Schoolmaster, ed., pp. 307-316. Faulkner, D.J., and McIntyre, S.C. 1996. "Persisting Sediment Yields and Sediment Delivery Changes." The Water Resources Bulletin 32(4): 817-829. Manuscript
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