Nicolai Brekenfeld

HS Hydrological Sciences

The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Nicolai Brekenfeld for the poster/PICO entitled:

A Small, Low-Cost Conductivity Sensor for Improved Quantification of Hyporheic Travel Times and Exchange Processes (Brekenfeld, N.; Kettridge, N.; Blume, T.; Ward, A.; Laudon, H.; Bishop, K.; Hannah, D.; Krause, S.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Nicolai Brekenfeld is a Ph.D. researcher at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Birmingham, UK. The aim of his Ph.D. thesis is to understand the dynamic interactions between surface water and groundwater and their impacts on the carbon and nutrient cycles within stream ecosystems, based on small (bedform) and medium (stream reach) scale experiments. The work presented on the poster at the EGU 2019 is about the design and first field application of a novel, small, robust and low-cost electrical conductivity sensor. Installed in any saturated porous media, networks of these sensors can provide direct information about flow paths, mixing behaviour and travel times of solutes at high spatial and temporal resolution. Combined with classical sampling techniques, metabolic transformation rates and total fluxes of carbon and nutrients can be calculated and compared with the in-stream metabolism. In addition, these sensor can assess the disturbance classical sampling techniques have on naturally occurring flow paths and flow rates.