Author Archives: Laura Toran

Ashleigh Kirker joined my research group Fall semester 2018.  She comes from College of Charleston where she conducted a stormwater sampling project for her undergraduate thesis.  We connected over stories of chasing storms.  We plan to further explore research interests … Continue reading →

I spent the last week of this month visiting Russia and caught a ladybug colored street sweeper in action. Moscow is a busy but clean city!

Post doc Sarah Ledford departed for a faculty position at George State University. We spent our last day together catching up on a stream assessment at one of the logger sites we missed last summer. I’ll miss Sarah a lot, … Continue reading →

Vince defended his thesis on characterizing an urban lot using geophysics. He compared EM to ERT and ERT won this round. To be continued in PhD student Gina Pope’s research project… Congratulations Vince!

A team from Temple and Villanova worked hard on a report on our first year of monitoring the rain gardens by I-95.  Our hard work was recognized by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials as one of … Continue reading →

I attended the last meeting of the National Academy of Sciences committee on the Edwards Aquifer Habitat Conservation Plan.  We met at Woods Hole to finish our final report — peaceful place to do writing.  After four years, it was … Continue reading →

Leanne Wiskemann began working on a project this summer to sample sediment from urban streams and look for sediment-bound P.  We are exploring different digestion methods.  Unfortunately, the ICP is down this summer, which makes it hard to analyze P.  … Continue reading →

It wouldn’t stop raining this month!  Luckily we were trying to monitor a few more storms on the Wissahickon with our nutrient loggers. Photo of the loggers at the site upstream of the Upper Gwynedd Wastewater Treatment plant.     … Continue reading →

PhD student Jim Berglund and I finally got to do a tracer test in the sinkhole near Tippery Spring in central PA.  Ellen Herman from Bucknell joined us to monitor the injection water.  We used our new fluoroscein loggers to … Continue reading →

Emily Arnold and I published her masters research on bank pin and turbidity monitoring in a special issue of the journal Water focusing on streambank erosion. Arnold, E., & Toran, L. (2018). Effects of Bank Vegetation and Incision on Erosion … Continue reading →