Seven free public lectures on current water issues and research come together to form the spring semester water seminar beginning in January.
The lectures will be held roughly every other week from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Wednesdays, beginning Jan. 14. All lectures will be in the first floor auditorium of Hardin Hall, northeast corner of 33rd and Holdrege streets, on UNL's East Campus. Subsequent lectures are Jan. 28, Feb. 11 and 25, March 11, and April 8 and 22.
"Each year we assemble a broad base of informative and educational talks on current state and regional water issues and current research that we hope are appealing to both students and the public," said Chittaranjan Ray, director of the Nebraska Water Center, which has helped organize and offer the annual water lectures since the 1970s.
Jasper Fanning, general manager of the Upper Republican Natural Resources District in Imperial, opens the series with a talk on the Nebraska Cooperative Republican Platte Enhancement (N-CORPE) pipeline designed to pipe groundwater into the Republican and Platte rivers when needed to meet river flow requirements.
Other talks focus on UNL's groundwater monitoring program, uranium contamination in municipal water systems, high-resolution GIS monitoring of the water cycle, the value of groundwater, wellhead protection programs and groundwater models for decision-making.
On Jan. 21, an off-week for the normal lecture series, Chuck Schroeder, executive director of the University of Nebraska's Rural Futures Institute, will talk on the new NU institute and its missions.
Co-sponsoring the lectures with the Nebraska Water Center, part of the Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute, is UNL's School of Natural Resources, which also offers the lecture series for student credit. The complete January through April lecture schedule appears below and is at http://watercenter.unl.edu. Individual lecture videos and speaker PowerPoint presentations will also be posted at that website within a few days after the lecture.
• Jan. 14 -- Jasper Fanning, general manager, Upper Republican NRD, "N-CORPE Pipeline Project."
• Jan. 28 -- Aaron Young, survey geologist, UNL School of Natural Resources, "Groundwater Monitoring Program."
• Feb. 11 -- Lynn Mayhew, assistant utilities director, Grand Island Utilities Department, "Uranium Contamination in Municipal Water Supplies."
• Feb. 25 -- Paul Houser, spatial analyst and remote sensing/GIS, George Mason University, "A Vision for an Ultra-high Resolution Integrated Water Cycle Observation and Prediction System."
• March 11 -- Kremer Memorial Lecture: Michael Schneiders, president, Water Systems Engineering Inc., "The Value of Groundwater."
• April 8 -- Ryan Chapman, wellhead protection coordinator, Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality, "Wellhead Protection."
• April 22 -- T. Prabhakar Clement, Harold Vince Groome Jr. Endowed Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Auburn University, "Worthiness of Complex Groundwater Models for Decision Making -- When Should we Say Enough Is Enough?"
— Steven W. Ress, Nebraska Water Center