Scott W. Roberts has led Mountain Studies Institute’s (MSI) Water Program for the past ten years. His research explores how landscape-scale disturbance and climate (including drought, wildfire, legacy mining, etc.) alters water quality, hydrology, and benthic macroinvertebrate communities. At MSI, Scott has implemented a decade-long benthic macroinvertebrate research program including establishing an in-house benthic macroinvertebrate identification laboratory. He has served as lead scientist for a variety of projects in the San Juan Mountains region since 2014 for partners including Bureau of Land Management; City of Durango; Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety; Environmental Protection Agency; PEW Charitable Trust; the Southern Ute Indian Tribe; and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
Prior to coming to MSI, Scott was trained as a geographer at Appalachian State University (B.S.) and University of Tennessee (M.S.). His graduate research examined the loss of the Eastern Hemlock from riparian forests of the southern Appalachians within the broader context of aquatic ecology, spatial analysis, and watershed resources. Scott spent five years with the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab where he explored how changing sediment, salinity, and climate regimes shape aquatic habitat and benthic macroinvertebrate communities; and investigated watershed-scale spatial variability of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Scott lives in Durango where he enjoys playing music with his wife and endlessly flipping over rocks to look for stream bugs with his two children.
Publications, etc can be found here.
Contact Scott at scott@mountainstudies.org
