Dr. Erich Hester

FACULTY AFFILIATE   |   Global Change Center

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Lab Website • Google Scholar • Dept Page

(540) 231-9758  •  ehester@vt.edu

Erich Hester is a water resources engineer with degrees in civil engineering and ecology.  Prior to academia he spent nearly a decade in the private sector as a design and planning engineer on river and wetland projects for ecological restoration, flood control, stormwater control, and pollutant mitigation in California and Washington State.  As a researcher, his group focuses on environmental hydraulics, defined as how hydrology, hydraulics, and geomorphology interact to influence ecological health and water quality in stream, river, wetland, and groundwater systems. The goal is to advance process-based knowledge to allow better informed restoration design, pollutant attenuation by natural processes, watershed planning, and energy generation.  An important recent direction is scaling knowledge of processes occurring at project sites to cumulative effects at much larger watershed scales.  These efforts are then plugged into regional stakeholder decision-making processes by agencies, watershed councils, and tribes seeking to solve challenging large-scale issues such as excess nutrients causing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and landscape/climate change impacting migratory fish populations in the Columbia River Basin.