9727111 Burges This grant provides partial support for the costs of developing an electronic device for monitoring the temporal progression of scour depth in gravel stream beds. Ten devices utilizing a magnetic switch system to record the passage of a sequence of indicator practice golf balls will eventually be built and field tested. Scour data will be recorded on a memory chip and downloaded in the field for future analysis. The instruments will be designed to have a useful life of a least six months. No comparable device currently exists with which to record the temporal progression of scour in gravel stream beds during storm events and this design is both clever and simple enough to have a high probability of being functional. A successful scour depth monitor will have practical application to problems in civil engineering, sedimentology and fisheries science. Scour data are particularly important for the engineering design of bridges and to prediction of salmonid larval recruitment in gravel stream beds of the western U.S. ***
