Environmental Internship Program - 2023 Booklet

WATER AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
PROJECT TITLE
Understanding Watershed
Processes in Complex
Terrain – Mountain
Hydrology Field Camp
ORGANIZATION(S)
Integrated GroundWater
Modeling Center,
Department of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering, Princeton
University
LOCATION(S)
Rocky Mountain
Biological Laboratory,
Gothic, Colorado
MENTOR(S)
Reed Maxwell,
William and Edna
Macaleer Professor of
Engineering and Applied
Science, Professor of Civil
and Environmental
Engineering and the High
Meadows Environmental
Institute; Harry Stone,
Ph.D. candidate, Civil and
Environmental
Engineering
Sarah Burbank ’25
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Certificates: African American Studies,
Quantitative and Computational Biology
Mountainous watersheds are important for
recharging the flow of Western American rivers.
Understanding these watersheds is critical
to modeling how climate change will affect
water resources, however, they are difficult to
model due to their complex terrain. I aimed
to improve understanding of the spatial and
temporal factors that govern soil moisture in
mountainous watersheds and to investigate the
viability of using machine learning to predict
soil moisture in highly complex terrain from
in situ measurements. I helped collect various
data over a small drainage in Colorado’s East
River watershed, including soil moisture data,
meteorological data and drone-collected
topographical characterization data. Then,
I used these datasets to run a random forest
regression machine-learning model to predict
soil moisture. These methods can be used to
extrapolate the findings of labor-intensive field
campaigns to larger areas. I learned skills in
data collection, organization and preprocessing.
Seeing how research can translate data from
real environmental trends into a computational
output was exciting. The experience also gave
me the opportunity to interact with successful
people at all levels of academia, which enabled
me to envision a future career path doing the
same.
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