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Acknowledgements
We thank the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) for supporting the Colorado State University Confucius Institute and the Water and Environmental Sustainability symposium series. Professor Yuefei Huang of Tsinghua University helped organize the Headwaters Symposium — we thank him for his work. The assistance of others at Tsinghua University and Ms. Sarah Schmeer in helping with the symposium is also acknowledged. Dr. Xiaoyu Chen of Higher Education Press helped coordinate this special issue.
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Dr. Steven R. Fassnacht, Professor of Watershed Science, Department of Ecosystem and Sustainability, Colorado State University
He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2000 after receiving a B.A.Sc. (Civil Engineering-Water Resources) in 1992 and M.A.Sc. (Civil Engineering) in 1995 from the same institution. From 2000 to 2002 he was a Research Associate in the Hydrology and Water Resources Department at the University of Arizona. Since then he has been faculty at Colorado State University. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, a Senior Research Scientist in the Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory and the Associate Director of the Vertically Integrated Projects Program at CSU and the Geospatial Centroid at CSU. Dr. Fassnacht’s research interests include improving our understanding of snow and cold land hydrological processes into different type of models and the impacts of a changing climate on water resources. To better understand cold land processes, his work is examining the spatio-temporal complexity of snowpack properties and their measurement. To examine how a changing climate affects water resources, his work is integrating human observations of change with station and geospatial information.
Dr. Ryan W. Webb, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), University of Colorado- Boulder and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
He received his Ph.D. from Colorado State University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering focusing on hydrologic science and engineering. He received his MS degree in Civil Engineering in 2012 as well as his BS degree in Construction Engineering in 2010 from the University of New Mexico. Ryan has professional experiences that include testing and validating modifications of TOUGH2 code, designing hydraulic and concrete systems for reservoirs, calculating seepage and infiltration from earthen dams, and construction estimating. He has traveled to Central and South America with Engineers Without Borders to work on water resources issues in indigenous communities in addition to spending three months in Beijing, China to participate in the establishment of a collaborative institute between Tsinghua University and Colorado State University. Dr. Webb’s research interests include representing the snow as a porous media, vadose zone hydrology, geophysical methods in snow measurements, hydrologic impacts of forest fires, and water resources in developing communities.
Dr. William E. Sanford, Associate Professor of Hydrogeology, Department of Geosciences, Colorado State University
He received his Ph.D. in Soil and Water Engineering and M.S. in Geophysics from Cornell University and a B.S. degree in Geology from Beloit College. He was also a Research Associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a visiting scientist at CSIRO, Australia and Garyounis University in Bengahzi, Libya. Dr. Sanford’s interests include use of isotopes and tracers in the study of groundwater and groundwater/surface water interactions, hydrogeophysics, transport of nanoparticles and flow and transport in fractured porous media. His research results provide information for the management and protection of water resources.
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Fassnacht, S.R., Webb, R.W. & Sanford, W.E. Headwater regions — Physical, ecological, and social approaches to understand these areas: introduction to the special issue. Front. Earth Sci. 11, 443–446 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-017-0667-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-017-0667-7