Faculty and Staff

Diane Boyer view CV: Diane Boyer is a photo archivist who curates the Desert Laboratory Repeat Photography Collection, which documents landscape change through time in the American Southwest, northern Mexico, and Kenya. In addition, she serves as a photographer, researcher, field assistant, and editor for the project.

Robert Webb view CV: Bob Webb is a geomorphologist/soil scientist/hydrologist/ecologist with a background in civil engineering. Early in his career, he edited a book and wrote several articles on the effect of off-road vehicles on desert soils. This work led to post-disturbance studies of soil recovery and plant succession in ghost towns. In the Mojave Desert, he found that plant succession indeed occurs in deserts, and discovered the value of repeat photography and packrat midden research. Bob has reconstructed paleofloods and historic channel changes in the Colorado River Basin, and was among the first to quantify the link between climate variability and flood frequency in southern Arizona. In 1984, he floated the Colorado River to study debris flows and their influence on formation of Grand Canyon rapids. He has floated the Grand Canyon many times since to estimate the magnitude and frequency of debris flows, as well as to document vegetation change. These river trips, justified by the Glen Canyon Environmental Impact Studies, culminated in a recent UA press book and several monographs that rely heavily on repeat photography. Bob Webb's National Research Program Project Bibliography details more of his research. You can also read more about Bob's work at the Riparian Vegetation Change page and the Mojave Desert Ecosystem Project page.

Affiliated Staff

Peter Griffiths view CV: Peter Griffiths is a hydrologist with Landscape Change in the Southwest, a project of the National Research Program, Water Resources Discipline. As a principal member of this NRP project, he is a contributor in all aspects of geomorphic and hydrologic research. Much of his work has centered on debris flows and channel-change in bedrock canyons of the Colorado Plateau, as well as sediment yield and transport in desert ecosystems. Most recently, he has pioneered the use of Larrea tridentata to map wind vectors and identify paths of eolian transport to threatened species habitat in the Coachella Valley. He also provides a range of technical assistance to the project, including all GIS, survey, GPS, and statistical support.

Christopher Magirl view CV: Christopher Magirl is a Hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tacoma, Washington. His research interests include hydraulics, hydrology water resources engineering, river mechanics, sediment transport, surface-water modeling, fluvial geomorphology, debris flows, and mountain processes.

Jeff Gartner view CV: Jeff Gartner has more than three decades of experience measuring and evaluating hydrologic conditions with USGS, National Research Program. He is presently involved in ongoing field measurements to quantify wind-driven and tidal circulation (including the 3-D velocity field), sediment dynamics, and the salinity field in support of numerical modeling efforts in estuaries and lakes. He is also interested in the use of acoustic backscatter measured by ADCP to estimate suspended solids concentration and use of ground based LIDAR to document changes in conveyance, aid in modeling flow and sediment transport, and evaluate potential changes in flood hazard in (dry) riverbeds.

Ray Turner view CV: Ray Turner is a plant ecologist whose interest has focused mainly on vegetation change in arid areas of North American and Africa. As part of the vegetation change theme, he has studied saguaro cactus and palo verde demography, changes in riparian plant communities, and climatic controls of contemporary plant distributions. Another facet of his vegetation change studies involves old landscape photographs that, when matched exactly, provide detailed insights into the kinds of changes that transpire under various climatic and cultural influences.