Stephanie Laseter
Southern Research Station
A favorite recent experience of mine was installing a series of flumes in several stream channels. We can use these flumes to measure the amount of water flowing in the streams. Installing these instruments means that we get to hike through the forest in search of the perfect location in the stream. In this photo, I am standing by a flume. Once the site is chosen, we fit a large fiberglass flume into the stream channel, making sure that we have it perfectly level. We can use an instrument called a pressure transducer to measure the height of the water in the flume. By putting these flumes in sites that have different forest types and various forest ages, we can learn a lot about how these forests use and store water.