Sara Kelly is a Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute where she serves as the program coordinator for the Adirondack Lake Assessment Program, a volunteer-based water quality monitoring program that began in 1998, leads Stream Wise and Lake Wise efforts on the New York side of the Lake Champlain Basin, regularly contributes expertise to a group of Adirondack partner organizations concerned with wake boat impacts and providing education and guidance to towns, lake associations, and the public on responsible boating, teaches and guest lectures at the College, and seeks out funding for new projects.
Sara received her PhD in Watershed Science from Utah State University and completed a post-doc at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where much of her research has been centered on understanding basin-wide water/climate/land-use changes as drivers of modern watershed sediment dynamics.
Academic
- PhD Watershed Sciences, Utah State University, 2019
- B.S. Environmental Science, Technology and Policy, California State University Monterey Bay, 2012
Courses Taught
- SCI495: Senior Capstone (Fall 2025)
- Guest Lecturer in SCI398: Special Topics, Science Communication Thru the Arts (Spring 2026)
My research interests are in the hydro-geo-sciences. My background and training are in hydrology and fluvial geomorphology, and I like to employ field techniques such as bathymetric and topographic surveying using hydroacoustics, GPS, and structure-from-motion photogrammetry to measure sediment erosion and deposition in lotic, lentic, and floodplain/near-shore environments to understand sediment transport dynamics and watershed sediment budgets, as well as leverage existing datasets from gauges, weather stations, and GIS/remote sensing, such as land use land cover data to answer questions about flood frequency, watershed hydrology and water budgets, and sediment transport. Given that the US EPA identifies sediment as one of the most commonly found pollutants in US waters and the USGS identifies sediment as a leading pollutant in rivers and streams, I hope to bring more attention to sediment research both at Paul Smith’s College and across the Adirondacks because mud matters for water quality and habitat integrity
Publications:
L’Hote M., Glennon M., Hall J., Kelly S., Smith C., Treibergs L., Vara C., Yerger E.C., Wiltse B. 2024. Adirondack Lake Assessment Program 2023 Report: a Community Science Lake Monitoring Program in its 26th Year. Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Available from: https://www.adklakes.org/reports.
Gran K, Dolph C, Baker A, Bevis M, Cho SJ, Czuba JA, Dalzell B, Danesh‐Yazdi M, Hansen A, Kelly S, Lang Z, Schwenk J, Belmont P, Finlay JC, Kumar P, Rabotyagov S, Roehrig G, Wilcock P, Foufoula‐Georgiou E. (2019). The power of environmental observatories for advancing multidisciplinary research, outreach, and decision support: the case of the Minnesota River Basin. Water Resources Research, 55. doi: 10.1029/2018WR024211
Kelly SA, Belmont P. (2018). High resolution monitoring of river bluff erosion reveals dominant failure mechanisms and geomorphically effective flows. Water 10(4), doi: 10.3390/w10040394.
Kelly SA, Takbiri Z, Belmont P, Foufoula-Georgiou E. (2017). Human amplified changes in precipitation-runoff patterns in large river basins of the Midwestern United States. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 21: 5065–5088, doi: 10.5194/hess-2017-133
Datasets:
Kelly, Sara, A; Brown, Elizabeth; Gran, Karen, B. (2020). High-resolution topographic data (TLS and SfM) of river bluffs in Amity Creek and the Knife River, Minnesota, USA, 2016-2018. Retrieved from the Data Repository for the University of Minnesota (DRUM), https://doi.org/10.13020/ddhz-dq50.
Kelly S, Call B, Levine S, Belmont P, Larson P. (2018). Minnesota River Bathymetry: 2013 – 2016, HydroShare, http://dx.doi.org/10.4211/hs.6cd3728f69cb4cb39c6f11baac1734ec.