Alumna Abigail Eckland ‘18 Brings an Upstream Perspective Home

When Abby Eckland returned to Tulane University for the McWilliams Seminar Series, she began by showing photographs from the research experience that helped launch her career.

The images captured Eckland as a Tulane undergraduate collecting water samples from the Mississippi River, preparing her first research poster and traveling through the Grand Canyon with students and faculty from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Years later, she stood before some of her former professors and a new generation of students to present research spanning tens of thousands of reservoirs and the river networks connecting them to coastal deltas.

For Eckland, who earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Earth Science with a minor in Public Health from Tulane in 2018, the seminar represented more than an opportunity to discuss her work.

“My whole Tulane experience set up where I am now and my research interests,” Eckland said. “Being here in the delta, next to the Mississippi River, I didn’t know about all the issues along with it until I took classes here.”

Eckland arrived at Tulane from Minnesota and found inspiration through field courses, study abroad and faculty members whose work demonstrated the possibilities within earth science. While studying in Australia during her junior year, she saw undergraduate and graduate students actively participating in research. When she returned to Tulane, she began asking how she could do the same.

A course with Professor Torbjörn Törnqvist helped connect her with Professor Mead Allison, who was seeking a student to assist with a Mississippi River project. Eckland completed an honors thesis with Allison focused on sediment transport, spending the fall collecting samples and the spring analyzing data and writing about her findings.

“Abigail’s path is a great example of what we hope undergraduate research can do,” said Kyle Straub, chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “As an undergraduate, she wasn’t simply learning about rivers and sediment transport in a classroom, she was working with Mead Allison on real questions involving sediment carried by the Mississippi River.”

That experience led directly to a research assistant position with the Water Institute of the Gulf after graduation. There, she participated in fieldwork and data analysis as part of what is now the organization’s applied geosciences group.

“That was where I was like, ‘Okay, I want to be an earth scientist,’” Eckland said. “What do I have to do to get to the level where the people I’m working with are at? And that answer was graduate school.”

Eckland enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder, initially planning to study sediment transport in the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted international fieldwork, she pivoted toward reservoir deltas and began investigating how sediment accumulates behind dams. She also spent several years interning with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, gaining experience that helped her examine reservoir sedimentation across the country.

That work ultimately contributed to a study published in Nature Communications in August. Eckland and her collaborators modeled sediment accumulation and water-storage capacity across more than 57,000 connected reservoirs in the continental United States. They estimated that sediment had displaced 7.7 percent of the reservoirs’ combined original storage capacity by 2025. More than two-fifths of the individual reservoirs had lost at least 25 percent of their designed capacity.

The implications extend far beyond the reservoirs themselves. Dams trap sediment that rivers would otherwise carry downstream, including material that can help coastal deltas build land and maintain elevation. Eckland’s research found that reservoirs upstream of the Mississippi River Delta hold approximately half of all the sediment accumulated behind dams nationwide.

Although dams are only one part of the Mississippi Delta’s land-loss challenge, Eckland said sediment management presents an opportunity to think differently about how regions use a valuable resource.

“A lot of studies that talk about the detriment to the Mississippi Delta blame upstream damming, but they don’t quantify it, or there’s no way to know how impactful it has really been,” Eckland said. “We can actually manage that, as opposed to sea-level rise, which is going to be really challenging to combat as a globe.”

Approaches such as sediment bypassing, reservoir flushing, dredging and carefully planned dam removal could restore some sediment movement while preserving the water supply, flood-control and hydropower benefits reservoirs provide. For Eckland, the larger goal is to encourage coastal researchers and decision-makers to look beyond the shoreline and consider the entire river network.

“It’s trying to get people down here to think about what’s going on upstream,” she said. “These dams are not just going to be trapping sediment forever. We should start thinking about how we can use upstream sediment from reservoirs down here beneficially.”

Eckland is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Louisiana State University New Orleans. Working with Dr. Madeline Foster-Martinez, she is studying the water depths that plants can tolerate as they first establish themselves in emerging delta environments. The project brings her research back to coastal Louisiana while incorporating vegetation into her work on sediment and delta processes.

Returning to Tulane allowed Eckland to share the perspective she gained by leaving Louisiana and studying river systems elsewhere.

“I definitely wouldn’t have gotten into that research if I hadn’t left,” she said. “So I think it’s kind of cool that I’m bringing that perspective back to New Orleans.”

Her advice to today’s Tulane students reflects the question that changed her own path: How can I get involved?

“If you think something is cool, try to get more involved in it,” Eckland said. “It’s also good even if you don’t like what you get involved in, because then you realize that’s not for you, and that’s still really important to know.”

Those experiences do not have to begin with a thesis or a major independent project, she added. A few hours each week helping a graduate student analyze data, troubleshoot code or complete laboratory work can introduce an undergraduate to research while building useful skills.

“I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t just asked around for research opportunities,” Eckland said.

Straub said Eckland’s return offered current students a tangible example of where those opportunities can lead while demonstrating the lasting relationships the department hopes to create.

“One of the things a department hopes to build is a community that extends well beyond the years a student is physically at Tulane,” Straub said. “Having Abigail return through the McWilliams Seminar Series is a wonderful example of that.”

For Eckland, that first question about undergraduate research led from the Mississippi River to Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Bureau of Reclamation and an investigation of reservoir systems across the United States. It eventually brought her home to New Orleans and back to the department where her career began.

“I absolutely had the best time at Tulane,” she said. “I’m just really happy to be back.”