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The Iowa Urban FEWS team is welcoming Tássia Mattos Brighenti to the team in March 2021. Tassia is Brazilian and graduated in with a B.S. in Environmental Engineering at University of Itajaí Valley in 2011. She did her M.S. (2013 – 2015) and Ph.D. programs (2015 – 2019) at Federal University of Santa Catarina. Since then she has been working with hydrological modeling, mainly with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool – SWAT model.

For her master´s thesis, a hierarchical calibration scheme was used to evaluate the SWAT model by considering land use and climate change. She also gained experience using and applying data from experimental sites while completing her M.S., where she established a monitoring network for the study watershed that generated data for SWAT model simulations.

For her Ph.D. thesis, her efforts were concentrated on modeling different aspects of water quantity in a wide range of watersheds (from 64 km² up to 15,000 km²) in Southern Brazil. The primary research focus was to understand the behavior of the SWAT model in simulating natural processes of Southern Brazil watersheds. Also during her Ph.D., the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development granted her a fellowship as a research visitor (June 2018 – July 2019) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

She is truly motivated to use her abilities with SWAT, together with the Iowa UrbanFEWS team, to harmonize the model structure and parametrization across multiple watershed scales in the Des Moines area and to evaluate the environmental and agronomic performance of a suite of cropping systems, including row crops, perennial grasses and/or horticultural crops.  Welcome Tássia!