News

Paul Hudson has been awarded a fellowship from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board

Paul Hudson, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment, has been awarded a fellowship from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for the 2007-08 academic year.

The title of his proposal is "Flood Management and Environmental Change along the Rhine River, Netherlands". His host department and institution will be the Department of Physical Geography and Earth Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Flood management of large lowland river systems requires extensive engineering and infrastructure to protect humans from flooding, and frequently the infrastructure results in unforeseen environmental change that endangers riverine and floodplain ecosystems, and in some instances increases the risk of flooding.

Dr. Hudson's research project will address the extent to which flood management along the Rhine River in the Netherlands was influenced by environmental change, and how flood management influences geomorphic and hydrologic processes. The project examines the historical evolution of Dutch flood management within the context of environmental controls and environmental change, notably sea level rise, land subsidence, and increasing flood magnitudes. For over two thousand years the Netherlands has experimented with a variety of approaches to flood management. Extensive documentation of these approaches combined with geographic and hydrologic data sets makes it possible to assess the impact of distinct forms of flood management on the environment and landscape.