About
Aditi Bhaskar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. Dr. Bhaskar specializes in changes to water resources that accompany urban development, with a focus on interactions between streams, groundwater, stormwater, and urban irrigation. Dr. Bhaskar received a Sc.B. in Geology-Physics/Math from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Bhaskar was a trainee of the National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) in “Water in the Urban Environment” at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Then, Dr. Bhaskar was an National Science Foundation Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow, which took her to the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, before joining Colorado State University. Dr. Bhaskar is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and serves on the Board of Directors of CUAHSI.
Recent News
| October 2022 | A recent publication in Hydrological Processes by Wilson et al.: Urbanization of grasslands in the Denver area affects streamflow responses to rainfall events with blog post version.
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| August 2022 | Welcome new MS student Nick Guthro and new PhD student Santi Ramirez Nunez!
Aditi is on the AGU H3S CUAHSI Panel on Navigating Academic Waters: |
| June 2022 | A recent publication in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association by Turner et al: Champions and Traditional Technocrats: The Role of Environmental Value Orientation in Stormwater Management with the blog post version at Federal regulations and individual values combine to determine what type of stormwater infrastructure is implemented |
| June 2022 | An op-ed in Colorado Politics on why it is important to fund a statewide turf replacement program (HB22-1151) and help reduce urban water use in Colorado. In June, House Bill 22-1151 was signed into law! Colorado Water Conservation Board is developing a Turf Replacement Program for Colorado using the allocated $2 million, with FAQs here. |
| May 2022. |
Students Dixie Poteet and Sam Carles Pedroza make learning fun for local fifth graders at the Poudre River Investigators field trip to the Environmental Learning Center by demonstrating the consequences of water flow. Also, Aditi was awarded the Meroney Family Chi Epsilon Teaching Award.
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| April 2022. |
Today the Colorado House is hearing a bill to create a statewide turf replacement program (HB22-1151). I have an op-ed in Colorado Politics on why it is important to fund this program and help reduce urban water use in Colorado. Coloradoans can send a message to their elected leaders to support this bill with Western Resources Advocates’ action.
Hydrology Days Student Showcases
Abdullah Al Fatta Quantifying Contributions of Water Sources to Urban Streams and Temporal Variation Using Multiyear Analysis of Water Stable Isotopes.
Ben Choat Towards Timely Policy-Relevant Analysis of the Return on Investment from Ecosystem Services in the South Platte River Basin.
Dixie Poteet, 2nd Place Winner Semi-Arid Rangeland to New Houses: Behavior of a Non-Perenneal Stream. |
| March 2022. |
A recent publication by Hopkins et al. (2022) in Freshwater Science: Lessons learned from 20 y of monitoring suburban development with distributed stormwater management in Clarksburg, Maryland, USA USGS summary: Unique 20-year study assesses ecosystem response to different types of stormwater management
Student Fellows learning from career panelists Anni Frid-Santos and Estella Moore.  |
| January 2022. |
A recent forum piece published:
A Call to Record Stormwater Control Functions and to Share Network Data by Choat et al. (2022) in the ASCE Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment. |
| December 2021. |
CSU Source article features some of our own MURALS FYS Academy students: CSU launches new MURALS academy to help retain first-year students of color  Assistant Professor Aditi Bhaskar of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, right, is working with her mentees on measuring streamflow along Spring Creek. From left are Arysa Puckett, Sam Carles, Genesis Lacy and Dixie Poteet. |
| September 2021. |
5280, Denver’s Mile High Magazine has a story about Fillo et al. (2021): Denver’s Urban Waterways Are Flowing With Tap Water From Your Sprinkler
Colorado Sun writes, Denver streams are glorified fountains, supplied mostly by your sprinkler heads Aditi is part of a new $15 million NSF-funded Transformation Network aiming to build resilient communities and ecosystems throughout the Intermountain Western United States. Read more about the Transformation Network here. |
| July 2021. |
Noelle Fillo’s MS work is published in Water Resources Research: Lawn irrigation contributions to semi-arid urban baseflow based on water-stable isotopes by Fillo, Bhaskar, and Jefferson (2021). More information on this research is here. |
| June 2021. |
Stacy Wilson successfully defends her MS thesis: |
| May 2021. |
Two recent articles published: K in an Urban World: New Contexts for Hydraulic Conductivity by Shuster et al. (2021) in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association. Assessing the use of dual-drainage modeling to determine the effects of green stormwater infrastructure on roadway flooding and traffic performance by Knight et al. (2021) in MDPI Water. |
| March 2021. |
Welcome to BS student Claire McWilliams! |
| February 2021. |
Aditi’s National Science Foundation proposal, “CAREER: Science and Education for Connecting Urban Irrigation Efficiency to Streamflow in Semi-Arid Cities” will be co-funded by the Hydrologic Sciences Program in the Geosciences Directorate and the Environmental Sustainability Program in the Engineering Directorate. |
| January 2021. |
Welcome to PhD student Abdullah Al Fatta! |
| December 2020. |
EWRI-CSU has a podcast with an interview with Aditi.  AGU’s EOS covers our recent WRR paper: Waterways Change as Cities Grow Nearby Selected Bhaskar group AGU Fall Meeting presentations: Ben Choat et al. present a talk entitled, “Synthesizing Stormwater Infrastructure in United States Cities: Are we speaking the same language?” Stacy Wilson and Aditi Bhaskar present a poster entitled, “Characterization of streamflow response to storms in semi-arid rangeland and urban watersheds in the Denver, Colorado, USA area” Aditi Bhaskar, Noelle Fillo, and Anne Jefferson present a talk entitled, “Estimating lawn irrigation contributions to semi-arid, urban baseflow using water-stable isotopes” |
| November 2020. |
Ben’s MS work wins the Editor’s Choice Award for the November 2020 issue of the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering for the article: Spatial Arrangement of Stormwater Infiltration Affects Subsurface Storage and Baseflow by Choat and Bhaskar (2020), Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. |
| August 2020. |
From the Salazar Center for North American Conservation webinar series: Study finds urbanization means different things to different watersheds, a CSU Source piece about our latest study: Hydrologic signals and surprises in U.S. streamflow records during urbanization by Bhaskar et al. (2020) in Water Resources Research. |
| June 2020. |
Welcome UWIN undergraduate research program researcher Matt, with Ben Choat and Aditi serving as Matt’s mentors. Katie Knight successfully defended her MS thesis entitled “Assessing the Use of Dual-Drainage Modeling to Determine the Effects of Green Stormwater Infrastructure Networks on Events of Roadway Flooding”  Some recent publications from our group: The Case for an Open Water Balance: Re‐envisioning Network Design and Data Analysis for a Complex, Uncertain World by Kampf et al. (2020) in Water Resources Research. Stormwater control impacts on runoff volume and peak flow: A meta-analysis of watershed modeling studies by Bell et al. (2020) in Hydrological Processes. Relationships between riparian evapotranspiration and groundwater depth along a semiarid irrigated river valley by Lurtz et al. (2020) in Hydrological Processes. |
| March 2020. |
Welcome MS student Stacy Wilson! Noelle Fillo successfully defended her MS thesis entitled “Quantifying Lawn Irrigation Contributions to Semi-Arid, Urban Stream Baseflow with Water-Stable Isotopes”  |
| October 2019. |
Welcome BS student Wyatt Young! Recent articles published: Changes in event‐based streamflow magnitude and timing after suburban development with infiltration‐based stormwater management by Hopkins et al. (2020) in Hydrological Processes. Spatial and Seasonal Response of Municipal Water Use to Weather across the Contiguous US by Opalinski et al. (2019) in Journal of the American Water Resources Association. An analytical approach to ascertain saturation‐excess versus infiltration‐excess overland flow in urban and reference landscapes by Stewart et al. (2019) in Hydrological Processes |
| June 2019. |
Use Flood Tracker to report where and when streets flood! |
| April 2019. |
Katie Knights wins 2nd place in the Hydrology Days student presentation competition! Aditi joins other CSU scientists in a letter opposing (1) the exclusion of ephemeral streams from protection as WOTUS and (2) determining the regulatory status of streams on the basis of flow regime rather than channel geomorphology. Aditi presents an invited seminar at Georgia State University in the Department of Geosciences. |
| March 2019. |
Noelle Fillo, Katie Knight, and Ben Choat present at Hydrology Days.  |
| March 2019. |
Ben Choat successfully defends his MS thesis! |
| January 2019. |
Welcome to new BS student Connor Williams! |
| August 2018. |
Welcome to new MS students Katie Knight, Noelle Fillo, and undergraduate honors thesis student Constance Dayan! |
| July 2018. |
Ben Choat and Amber Pulido present posters at the Urban Water Innovation Network meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado. Photo taken by @marythewxlady  |
| June 2018. |
Ben Choat presents a poster at the International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software (iEMSs) in Fort Collins titled “Coupled Numerical Modelling of Baseflow Response to Spatially-Distributed Stormwater Infiltration” and wins 2nd place in the student poster competition! |
| June 2018. |
Our new paper published in Hydrological Processes: Groundwater recharge amidst focused stormwater infiltration. |
| June 2018. |
Welcome to new group members Damiano (visiting student from University of Trento, Italy) and Amber (UWIN URP student)! |
| May 2018. |
NSF-CBET-Environmental Sustainability grant “Collaborative Research: Connecting local stormwater decision-making to environmental outcomes” awarded to PI Anne Jefferson and co-PIs Dave Costello, V. Kelly Turner, and Aditi Bhaskar. More information at Anne’s page: http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2018/06/announcing-storms/ |
| May 2018. |
Nicole Opalinski successfully defends her MS thesis! |
| February 2018. | Aditi Bhaskar and Krissy Hopkins give one of the 4 cyberseminars in the CUAHSI series on urban stormwater hydroinformatics. |
| December 2017. | Activities at the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, LA: Nicole Opalinski gave a poster presentation. Aditi gave a poster presentation in the runoff generation processes session and co-convened the session on “Water, Energy and Society in Urban Systems”. |
| November 2017. | Nicole Opalinski wins one of the three the Walter Scott Jr., College of Engineering awards at the CSU Graduate Student Showcase! |
| October 2017. | New paper is out in Hydrological Processes: A.J. Jefferson, A.S. Bhaskar, K.G. Hopkins, R. Fanelli, P.M. Avellaneda, and S.K. McMillan (2017), Effectiveness of stormwater management networks and implications for urban watershed function, Hydrological Processes, doi: 10.1002/hyp.11347. |
| October 2017. | Presented on the drivers of urban base flow at the 17th Annual Syracuse Center of Excellence Symposium and the Syracuse University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering seminar series.  COE 17th Annual Symposium 2017 Water + Energy + Design Innovations for Healthy Vibrant Communities |
| June 2017. | Presented on the effects of green infrastructure on base flow and recharge at the 7th annual HydroEco conference at the University of Birmingham, UK. |
| March 2017. | Van Tuyl Lecture in Geology and Geological Engineering at Colorado School of Mines.
Photo taken by Reed Maxwell |
| January 2017. | Welcomed two new group members: Nicole Opalinski and Ben Choat. |
| December 2016. | Presentation of the water table fluctuation method applied to a green infrastructure watershed at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. |
| November 2016. | Our new paper came out in JAWRA: Coupling of the Water Cycle with Patterns of Urban Growth in the Baltimore Metropolitan Region, United States |
| October 2016. | Presentations at the Uncertainty in Water Resources and Environmental Sustainability Symposium at Southwest University (SWU) in Beibei, Chongqing, China and the third annual ECNU-CSU Joint Symposium on Urban Water.
Photo at Southwest University symposium, featuring Steven Fassnacht, John Moore, Aditi Bhaskar, taken by Thomas Borch.
Photo at Shanghai Bund of Thomas Borch, John Moore, and Aditi Bhaskar. |
| July 2016. | A webmapping application is launched that allows users to swipe between 2004 and 2012 land cover in Clarksburg, MD |
| April 2016. | Our new paper came out in Hydrological Processes: Urban base flow with low impact development. |
| January 2016. | A new paper is out in Freshwater Science: Will it rise or will it fall? Managing the diverse effects of urbanization on base flow. |
