Tuesday November 18, 2025
Environmental Monitor —
A snowflake swirls high in the atmosphere, whisked across the winter sky before landing on Crystal Peak in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. It sits on this peak until the spring, when temperatures warm and the snowmelt starts to flow into the nearby Dog Valley.
Surging down the slope, the water molecule now drains into Dog Creek and its watershed, which careens down past the California-Nevada border. Snaking through mountains and meadows full of wildflowers, the creek joins the Truckee River just over the border into Nevada.
Here, the river widens and slows, meandering east through Reno, trading alpine scenery for vast, arid desert. After slicing through the city, it bends north and empties into Pyramid Lake. It’s here, on the edge of the Great Basin, that its journey ends for now.
Along the way, the former snowflake changes, transforming matter state and dropping over 3,000 feet in elevation. Yet, the creek and river through which it flows also initiate changes in the surrounding ecosystem: expanding, contracting, and instigating chemical and biological fluxes that scientists are only beginning to uncover.
One of these scientists is Joanna Blaszczak, a University of Nevada professor who’s chosen the Dog Valley, sandwiched between Crystal Peak and the Truckee River, as her research area.
Here, she’s working together with her graduate student, Deandre Presswood, to understand what changes the snowflake sees in the creeks along its journey. With study sites operating year-round across the valley, Blaszczak and Presswood are building a data bank that will provide insights into the changes befalling this underresearched watershed.
What’s Driving the Watershed Chemistry?
Blaszczak’s lab is part of the QuEST Project, a nationwide network of researchers seeking to understand and predict biogeochemical changes in watersheds as their streams expand and contract.
The Dog Valley watershed is unique, however, being a high-altitude, snow-melt-dominated system in an arid region of the country. Therefore, Blaszczak is investigating how snowpack variability impacts the extent and water quality conditions of the downstream network.
When snow melts high in the mountains, Dog Creek and the other tributaries that run through Dog Valley flow with vigor. By the end of summer, however, she explains that most of the watershed has run dry, save for the mainstem of the creek and a few springs higher up in the mountains.
Therefore, part of her project examines how changes in discharge driven by snowmelt change downstream water quality within the watershed and at its outlet. However, in her study of Dog Valley, Blaszczak has noticed something else that could be influencing the biogeochemistry of the system.
Despite the heavy topographic relief within the watershed, Dog Creek encounters a stretch of flat land within the valley in the form of an idyllic meadow.
“Dog Valley, like a lot of Sierra Nevada watersheds, has a meadow partway through its watershed,” Blaszczak explains. “And what we’ve noticed is that the meadow is a biogeochemical hot spot.”
This means that her QuEST project can’t rely solely on snowmelt and discharge measurements to estimate how water quality changes in the watershed. Although these factors drive the stream networks’ expansion and contraction, chemical fluxes in Dog Creek may have less to do with stream connectivity and more to do with the local, organic matter-rich pockets it flows through.
“Part of our theory was that some of the controls on water chemistry are based on how much of the upstream network is connected, where the sources are,” Blaszczak says, referring to the springs and snowmelt on Crystal Peak and other mountains. “But part of it also could be local conditions.”
Therefore, Blaszczak’s project with Presswood is expansive, covering the watershed from mountain peak to meadow, gathering holistic baseline data on everything from snow height to dissolved oxygen.
Working with Sensors and Grab Sample Sites Across the Valley
In a watershed so complex yet underresearched, Blaszczak’s sensor setup and study sites cover a lot of ground. Similar to other QuEST projects, she has three nested sensor sites on Dog Creek and 20 tributary sites within the watershed where she and her students collect grab samples.
Blaszczak’s upstream sensor site is located at a mountain spring above the meadow, where it flows even when many other tributaries run dry. Her middle sensor is located on the main stem of the creek near the end of the meadow, and her final site is placed at the outlet of the whole watershed, right where Dog Creek enters the Truckee River.
“The point of that was to basically capture the evolution of chemistry as moving from high elevation, sort of last-to-melt-out snow sites, all the way down through this meadow, [and] all the way down to the catchment’s outlet,” Blaszczak says.
Therefore, the sensor sites can capture how water quality changes from headwater to outlet. All three are equipped with UV-VIS s::can spectrolysers to measure stream chemistry at high frequencies (i.e., every 15 minutes).
Blaszczak and her students also take grab samples, which are sent to QuEST partners at the University of New Hampshire, to understand where chemical fluxes are arising. Even during the dry season, they will trek up the valley to check on tributaries, simply taking pictures and noting the absence of flow when they’re dried up.
In addition to their traditional sensor setup, Blaszczak and Presswood are working to better characterize snowmelt throughout the watershed. At several sites in the valley this upcoming winter, Presswood and others in the Blaszczak lab will dig snow pits to measure snowpack height, and then monitor cameras to track the total snowfall all winter.
Then, when the snow begins melting, she has the equipment to estimate discharge rates. Her lab has placed ten Solinst Leveloggers to measure water level and two Solinst Barologgers at the lowest and highest elevation sites to measure atmospheric pressure among the Dog Creek tributaries.
She explains that these loggers help her build discharge rating curves, which she can calibrate and use to predict discharge rates across the watershed, even at tributaries without equipment.
Further down the valley, the meadow continues churning out biological processes in its organic-matter-rich environment. To understand how much biological activity is actually occurring in the meadow, and therefore estimate if it’s contributing to chemical fluxes downstream, she uses PME miniDOT Dissolved Oxygen Loggers alongside the level logger locations.
“We can see how much of the variance in the water chemistry we can predict by having that additional understanding of biological activity, with dissolved oxygen as a proxy,” Blaszczak explains.
Overall, she is taking snapshots of watershed chemistry throughout the entire year. Then, by measuring snowpack, stream discharge, and biological activity, Blaszczak hopes to understand the forces driving chemical changes in the non-perennial watershed.
“Getting really high-resolution data within a catchment that doesn’t have a ton of infrastructure is a big challenge, and so we’re trying to make those initial steps,” Blaszczak says. “You can’t just collect the chemistry data. You have to know about a lot of different sources, a lot of inputs, both hydrologic and chemical.”
The Beginning of a Water Quality Monitoring Network in Dog Valley
The QuEST Project has provided Blaszczak an opportunity to not only conduct an in-depth watershed research project, but also conduct it somewhere that’s rarely been studied before.
Non-perennial streams are historically underresearched and underappreciated, according to Blaszczak. In fact, they aren’t protected under the Clean Water Act because they don’t flow throughout the entire year.
“Even if a stream is dry part of the year, it doesn’t mean that it’s not really important for biogeochemistry,” she says. “[…] so they definitely deserve protection.”
However, they are increasingly being recognized as important parts of their ecosystem, which is one of the reasons the QuEST project was formed. The project is funded by the Department of Energy’s EPSCoR Grant, which offers funding for states with low federal research funding.
Nevada is one of these states, and pales in comparison to its neighbor, California, in terms of research. Blaszczak says that the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which drains into the Great Basin, is much less researched, something she hopes to change.
Blaszczak further explains that snow-melt-dominated watersheds like Dog Valley are already unpredictable, and being on the edge of an arid region that’s already facing water problems means that understanding the system is even more important.
“Our climate is becoming more variable through time, and so you can’t predict when years are going to be more crazy than others, because it’s so variable,” Blaszczak says.
She explains that monitoring infrastructure needs to be in place and recording baseline watershed conditions before water quality predictions can be made. Yet, with a better picture of how places like Dog Valley act throughout the year, whether they are “crazy” or normal, researchers and managers can be better prepared for the future.
Luckily, the QuEST Project has allowed Blaszczak to create this baseline monitoring. Covering an entire watershed across thousands of feet in elevation change is difficult, but she is confident in the system of sensors’ ability to help her track the changes that are inevitably coursing through the watershed.
“I love working with high-frequency sensors, especially in the water, because it’s showing you things that you can’t see with your own eyes,” Blaszczak says.
The QuEST Project is still less than two years off the ground, and its database is still being built up, but it finds itself at the forefront of an important area of watershed research. Working to piece together the mechanics of underresearched stream networks in underresearched states is a challenge, but one that Blaszczak and her colleagues are tackling head-on.