By Lael Gilbert ’01

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Despite the name, it’s actually rust-and-cream colored water that flows between the banks of the Green River in southeastern Utah. As a flotilla of canoes meanders down the narrow sandstone stretches and around the gooseneck bends of Labyrinth Canyon, every dip of the paddle launches a whorl of chai-colored eddies across the slow currents. 

At camp, buckets of river-sourced wash water leave hands feeling mildly gritty — but arguably still cleaner — after a long day of propelling packed boats through late-summer flows. 

Grit, both literal and figurative, is something this particular group of Utah State students is anxious to experience. They’ve assembled from campuses across the state for a week-long field experience organized by USU ecologist Terry Dial. The group came together with two main objectives: to experience firsthand the complex ecological and social dilemmas facing the Colorado River watershed at an especially pivotal point in history, and to launch a research project to monitor ubiquitous and problematic invasive plants that pepper the banks of the Green River. 

Dial says this kind of dedicated outdoor experience is key to preparing undergraduates for next steps in their professional careers.

“Many of these folks will become Utah land managers in the next few years, and this kind of hands-on experience offers a good sense of the complexity and nuance they’ll face after they leave campus,” says Dial, who is from Quinney College of Natural Resources and based out of USU’s Moab campus. 

Organizing a trip like this isn’t simple. It requires careful logistical planning, coordination with busy academic schedules, a fair amount of face-to-face encouragement, specialized outdoor knowledge, and considerable expense. Staying in the classroom is infinitely easier — but ‘easy’ isn’t always the best kind of education.

“Students are getting ready to hurl themselves into a complicated world of competing values and shifting ecosystems,” he says. “It’s really important to get well beyond the simplicity of what they might absorb from a classroom lecture. Getting outside to actually experience places like this, to thoroughly understand a river system and the stakes involved in its management, is a pivotal part of real learning.”

Not that the group of 10 students — both undergraduate and graduate in various science majors — are coming in completely blind. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone these days who hasn’t heard something about the dire predicament facing the Colorado River. Water supply is declining due to drought, a shifting climate, massive demands from agriculture, and the growing needs of large cities in the U.S. and northwestern Mexico. This supply-and-demand pressure creates a decidedly high-stakes political environment in which future management is now being negotiated on state and federal levels. 

But debate about how the water supply offered by the river should be divvied up isn’t just about economics. Endangered and threatened native fish and birds depend on its habitat. People use it for recreation. It’s an important source of hydropower to light homes and power businesses across the region. The river not only serves a vital role for seven Western U.S. states and two Mexican states, but also for more than 30 sovereign tribal nations.

Since the turn of the century natural runoff in the watershed has dropped by 13%. The two largest reservoirs in the system haven’t been full since the end of last century with a few sobering periods in which the entire reservoir system reached precariously low conditions. 

Despite the persistent hope that occasional wet years will replenish supply, reservoirs remain seriously low, say experts like Jack Schmidt from the Center for Colorado River Studies at USU. From southwestern Wyoming and the Colorado Rockies to southern California, Phoenix, Mexicali, and Tijuana, the repercussions for these deep and difficult negotiations for managing the river’s future will be keenly felt by the 40 million people, as well as the river’s ecosystems, Schmidt says.

These high-stakes issues can overshadow details transpiring just upstream from the Green’s confluence with the Colorado River. As the Colorado’s main tributary, the Green River is a powerful case study for understanding the nuance of the greater watershed. From its headwaters in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, the Green River meanders for 450 miles through the eastern half of Utah as 11 dams interrupt the flow, including Flaming Gorge. Vitally important in dry western states, dams are nonetheless astonishingly hard on river systems.

“With every dam and diversion you add to a river, you lose some of the power of snowmelt floods,” says Phaedra Budy, aquatic ecologist from USU’s department of Watershed Sciences and unit leader for the USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. “Without this energy injected into the river every spring, you don’t get construction of the kinds of complex river structures and habitats that native fish species need to survive during different parts of their lifespan.”

Efforts to soften the negative impact of dams and over-allocation of the water include reintroducing beaver (or building structures in the river to replicate the function of beaver dams), designing water releases to partially mimic natural flows, and projects to remove invasive plants that outcompete native species along the river’s banks. These aggressive species would otherwise dominate a space, left to their own devices, disrupting ecosystems and pushing out native wildlife and fish.

“River restoration projects can do more than just bring back native fish, as important as they are to the ecosystem,” Budy says. “They boost populations of deer, elk, mountain lions, mountain goats, and many, many kinds of birds.” 

The curriculum for this field trip included lessons on the fundamentals of river ecology and a tutorial on the management and economic stakes of water in the West. The sense of awe at landing in such a landscape, though not explicitly listed on the curriculum, is also inevitable. For most of the students on this field experience — raised in alpine and desert environments — this was their first overnight trip on any river. 

Great blue herons glide over the creamy water and land with a graceful froth of feathers in the shallows to hunt for lunch. A copse of cottonwood mingled with Gambel oaks and willows grows along the shoreline. Wildlife wanders within side canyons through long-abandoned evidence of human settlements — mines and ranches, petroglyphs and modern-day graffiti.

“You don’t often get this kind of front-row perspective on the details and workings of a natural ecosystem,” says Truman Breinholt-Mitchell, an undergraduate student studying forest ecology. I’ve read a lot about the impacts of dams and drought, but actually witnessing it changing a river brings a different kind of meaning to that information.”

For Jordan Van Sickle, unlike others in the group, this is all very familiar territory. A restoration coordinator for the Utah Department of Natural Resources, he’s spent countless hours working on the banks of the Green River in a slow-motion battle against invasive species: tamarisk, non-native phragmites and Russian olive. The scale of the problem is huge, he says, hundreds of miles of stream habitat that needs on-the-ground labor to pull it back from the grasp of invasive plants. 

Van Sickle’s strategy has shifted to a priority focus on overgrown side channels where his hard-working crew can create more of an impact by freeing banks from the binding roots of invasive vegetation before the ecosystem tips entirely in their favor. 

Decisions about where to focus those efforts have relied on a LiDAR scan of the entire river corridor — LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, is mounted on aircraft and uses lasers to create 3D models of the earth’s surface — completed in 2015. That data is now out of date, and repeating it is prohibitively expensive. So, Van Sickle came up with a Plan B. He wondered if drone-collected photos could act as a proxy for differentiating species and evaluating more recent changes in river vegetation.

This would be pioneering new territory in drone science, and USU aviation expert Shalyn Drake agreed to partner with the group to test the experimental approach. She appreciates the “boots-on- the-ground” strategy offered by this kind of undergraduate research opportunity.

“This kind of work isn’t straightforward,” she says. “It requires asking a lot of questions that don’t necessarily have cut-and-dried answers. But it does build serious problem-solving skills. When you have to take messy reality and make it into science, you learn a lot more than when the answers are just handed to you.” 

Drake says people generally don’t realize that only 20% of working with drones is flying them. The rest of the time is spent understanding, deciphering, and working with the data. 

“When you have to figure out a way to gather the right kind of information, to organize it and apply it to your questions, that takes a lot of practical and creative thinking,” she says. “Seeing that process, and being an active participant in it, is really valuable to a student.”

For instance, standing in the shade of a tree in this riparian landscape, it’s fairly easy to distinguish Gambel oak from greasewood, Hackberry from Mexican privet. But from the sky, it’s another story entirely — it’s all just green. Typical aerial photography captures a tartan jumble of green foliage that makes it hard to identify specific species of plants and trees. But the information is essential for Van Sickle to be able to make decisions about where to focus his efforts, to choose which side-channel habitats have the best chance of recovery.

A possible solution, the team has speculated, is to train AI to do the bulk of that identification work. But that idea needs to be tested.

On the second day of the river trip, the students carefully muck their way across a bank thick with mud to access an area labeled on the map as Ten Mile Wash. Once they struggle up to dry soil, Drake offers a brief tutorial on essential skills needed to launch and fly a drone. They scatter among the scrubby vegetation, wandering with purpose until they can identify certain species. Flying low, the drone begins a reconnaissance mission up and down the stretch of riverbank as the students stand vigil under Hackberry and tamarisk, holding toward the sky a rather low-tech solution to a high-tech problem — scraps of paper with marker scrawls that identify the species so they can later be distinguished and classified to help the AI programming distinguish them from the jumble of green in the aerial images.

Difficult for a human eye to differentiate, tell-tale clues in photo information are more obvious under electronic observation. If an AI algorithm can be trained to differentiate species of plants and trees based on the drone footage, Van Sickle will have access to the information he needs to do his job at a fraction of the cost. 

Back on the Logan campus, the drone data is handed off to researchers taking part in a new geospatial artificial intelligence student program in the Quinney College of Natural Resources. AI harnesses vast amounts of data collected by drones to draw insights about longer-term changes — like monitoring vegetation, as well as in agriculture and land use, urban green spaces, renewable energy, and water management.

“This technology has potential to address some of the Earth’s and society’s most pressing challenges,” says Elise Laugier, assistant professor of geospatial science. “It is transforming the speed at which we can extract meaning from complex datasets like this one.”

This collaboration between students, ecologists, and geospatial AI experts illustrates the potential at the forefront of this new field. The boundary between classroom learning and applied research is thin here, and students get the chance to gain hands-on experience with brand new data, literally right out of the field. The goal of this new program is to prepare students for deep technology careers in Utah, as illustrated with work to support restoration on the Green River.

In future years, more undergraduate researchers will have the chance to launch canoes in the creamy water of the Green River, return to Ten Mile Wash and re-measure vegetation at the site — a long-term effort that offers managers like Van Sickle essential and up-to-date information about changes in invasive vegetation, and gives USU students ongoing opportunities for hands-on experience in undergraduate research to build skills for high-impact and reality-based careers.