Who are we?

The Murphy Watershed Science Lab is a research group led by Dr. Brendan Murphy, an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University.
​
​Our work combines principles and techniques from geomorphology, hydrology, and ecology to improve our understanding of how variability and disturbances in natural and anthropogenic processes influence watersheds and their natural resources.

Explore our webpage and learn more about the people, science,
​and potential research opportunities in our group.

Featured Science & Latest News

 Looking for a better and easier way to delineate watersheds?  

We have developed the new USUAL Watershed Tools! This is an open access (and open source) ESRI toolkit designed for fast, streamlined, and automated landscape delineation. Using a familiar ArcGIS interface and with limited data inputs, the USUAL Watershed Tools will automatedly delineate watersheds, hydrogeomorphic sub-catchments, interfluves, and a discretized river network that is attributed and ready for 1-D routing models. Additionally, USUAL was developed to address and automate many usual and tedious GIS tasks related to the delineation of large watersheds, including but not limited to: nested watersheds, delineations around topographic exclusion areas (e.g., reservoirs), and discretizing and computing link-average widths for river or valley bottom polygons.
For more details, you can find our paper (David et al., 2023) at:
The ArcGIS toolboxes (and Python scripts) are all available for download on our
'Watersheds & Wildfire Research Collaborative' GitHub Repository: ​

Active Research Topics

Wildfire

Hydrogeomorphic processes & responses in burned watersheds.

River Erosion

Weathering & erosional processes driving the evolution of bedrock rivers.

EcoGeomorphology

Physical habitat disturbance, population dynamics, and ecological resilience.

Our Mission


Expand fundamental knowledge about the integrated physical, biological and human influences on watersheds, as well as improve predictions of watershed responses to environmental disturbances.
​

Meet the

People

Find Our

Publications

Discover New

Opportunities

Current FUNders

Home       PEOPLE      Research      Publications      Opportunities