Geography : Faculty - Clay Arango

Clay Arango Black Hall 225-31 Phone: (509) 963-1289 Email: arangoc@cwu.edu

Streams are diverse environments with immense importance to arid regions such as Eastern Washington. My interest in streams began during my undergraduate education at CWU, where I majored in geography and began to understand the interaction between humans and the landscape. After a coffee-house hiatus that corresponds to a wide gap in my resume, I returned to CWU to pursue a master’s degree in Natural Resource Management. During my master’s research, I became interested in flow regulation, specifically an operation that occurs annually on the Yakima River called ‘flip-flop.’ Flip-flop is a resource management system that attempts to optimize delivery of irrigation water and spawning habitat for spring Chinook salmon. I researched the unintentional consequences of flip-flop by analyzing how flow regulation affected aquatic insect community structure in the upper Yakima River. I continued my research interest in streams by pursuing a PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. There, I studied how urban and agricultural land use altered how streams process and remove nitrogen, an important nutrient in fertilizers. I returned to Eastern Washington, in part, because the geographer in me loves this landscape and also because I enjoy teaching. As an adjunct professor in Geography I hope to engage students in discovering how humans modify their environment and to help students cultivate an appreciation for the natural world. The scientist in me needs to stay busy also, so I have also initiated a study of how a restoration project will affect nutrient dynamics in Wilson Creek, a small, fish-bearing stream that flows through campus.