Brandon Yokeley

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at Idaho State University studying water tracks, curvilinear zones of increased saturation on Arctic hillslopes, and gullies, thermokarst features that commonly form in water tracks, in the upland Arctic. I received a B.S. in quantitative geoscience at Appalachian State University in 2019 and an M.S. in geology at Kansas State University in 2021.

My research here at Idaho State University has allowed me to spend the past three summers on Alaska's north slope at Toolik Field Station instrumenting and maintaining three field sites to investigate the hydrological differences between water tracks and gullies. In addition to this, I have spent several weeks walking across the tundra collecting field observations of gullies so that I can partition gullies into different classes and better understand their evolution on the landscape. I use this field data and field observations in conjunction with high-resolution lidar data to quantify gully abundance on Arctic hillslopes, hypothesize how gullies form on these hillslopes, and what their evolution through time may look like.

The field data I have collected over the past three years will also allow me to investigate how hillslope responses to storms will differ adjacent to gullies and water tracks. This is important as we hypothesize that gullies are becoming more common on the landscape due to climate change, thus understanding the hydrological differences between gullies and water tracks will allow us to better understand how hillslope hydrology may change in a warming climate.