Mindy Conyers wins national poster competition

Mindy Conyers, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography, has won the Graduate Student Poster Competition of the Water Resources Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. The award was announced recently at the AAG’s 2007 annual meeting.

Conyers’ poster, titled “Flow Resistance Estimation in the Upper Animas River Watershed, Colorado, USA,” was one of seven posters entered in the contest from institutions including the University of Montana, Montana State University, Morehead State University, and Clark University. The poster proposes a method for estimating river velocity more accurately. Accurate estimates of river velocity are of particular interest to those involved in land use management, flood plain development, and channel change prediction.

Conyers, who is studying fluvial geomorphology, plans to write her dissertation on fluvial geomorphic relationships in three headwater streams of the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. She expects to graduate in May 2008. In 2005 and 2006, she received a grant from the Mountain Studies Institute to complete her dissertation field work in Colorado. In 2005, she published an article in Physical Geography with Geography Professor Dr. Mark Fonstad, based on her thesis work at Texas State and titled “The unusual channel resistance of the Texas Hill Country and its effect on flood flow predictions.” She was nominated as the Student Director of the Water Resources Specialty Group at the AAG annual conference.