Ursula’s research is into providing quantitative, scientific bases for environmental management decisions, particularly regarding issues of water quality and water resource sustainability. Ursula started on this path through studying Chemical Engineering at the University of Sydney. After a final year exchange in Sweden, Ursula entered into postgraduate studies in a multidisciplinary Swedish research program on the environmental impact of mining. In 2004 Ursula returned to Australia to take up a postdoctoral project on the acidic lakes that can form after open cut mining. Since this time, Ursula has worked on a range of research and contract projects, usually in close collaboration with industry and government stakeholders, and in all cases with the aim to quantify how surface waters, groundwater, and/or soils will evolve, under either continued current conditions or changed external forcing.
Since mid-2012, Ursula has worked on incorporating environmental isotopes into regional groundwater models for water resource assessment. The large and inaccessible nature of aquifer systems means that they are difficult to characterize; this in turn introduces uncertainty into flow models. Environmental isotopes that decay or accumulate over time, such as radiocarbon (14C), are widely used as tracers of groundwater “age”. Ursula has been working on ways to incorporate the isotopic tracers directly into groundwater models. If successful, this will result in improved groundwater model predictions and resource management tools. Furthermore, as the age-ranges that environmental isotopes are valid for can be tens or hundreds of millennia, the same tools allow investigation into what climatic conditions must have been in the past in order to create the isotopic concentrations that exist today.
Ursula will work with Prof. Steven Gorelick and colleagues at Stanford to incorporate additional environmental tracers into a modelling framework that has already been developed, in order to make the method more robust. This modelling tool will then be used to produce an analysis of paleoclimate, over the last 40,000 years or more, using data from a relatively data-rich Australian case study site. The time at Stanford and visits to other institutions will link Ursula to forerunners in the relevant fields in America, and facilitate continuation of collaboration on this and other topics upon her return to Australia.