Center for Transformative Environmental Monitoring Programs

Dr. Selker, OSU professor of Biological and Ecological Engineering and co-Director of both CTEMPs.org and TAHMO.org, has worked USA, Kenya, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Canada, Chile, and England and carried out research in Chile, Ghana, Senegal, Israel, China, and 10 European countries.  His areas of expertise include electronic design irrigation and water systems, and development projects. Dr. Selker has been a professor in the department of Biological and Ecological Engineering at Oregon State University for 25 years focused on Water Resources Engineering, publishing 160 peer-reviewed articles. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and 2013 received the John Hem Award for Science and Technology from the American Groundwater Association.

Current Research: 

Lab experiments are conducted in three facilities, including many column and chamber experiments investigating transport, degradation, and retention of materials as a function of microbial, geologic, and hydrologic conditions.

Numerical research includes simulation of two and three-phase flow in porous media, focusing on the role of local heterogeneity upon fate and transport. Capillary barrier systems are included in field, lab, and numerical investigations.

Field experiments are ongoing in Oregon (atmospheric turbulence, river/aquifer exchange, artificial recharge of aquifers for habitat restoration), Oklahoma and Spain (soil moisture dynamics at 0.25-1,000 m scales), Senegal (automated remote monitoring of hydrologic variables), China (stream/aquifer interactions), Chile (hydrologic processes in landscapes with swelling soils), and Israel (internal waves and double-diffuse diffusion processes in hypersaline environments).

Dr. Selker's research includes development of instrumentation (passive capillary sampling devices for vadose-zone sampling, tensiometers and tension infiltrometers for site characterization, and use of LUX light-emitting microbes for continuous in-situ monitoring of microbial colonization and movement in unsaturated media, fiber optics for environmental monitoring using temperature, etc.), the characterization of vadose zone and hyporheic processes (capillary barriers, nutrient and pesticide loss from agricultural fields, groundwater/surface water interactions), and analytical/numerical representations of hydrological processes (Boussinesq equation, HYDRUS simulations, etc).