New Page 1

Christopher Alan Tomsic

My life long career goal is to work with a company/organization who specializes in restoration of natural areas, particularly rivers, streams, wetlands, and coastal areas. I believe that these natural wonders play a key role in our existence on this planet. The education I have received at The Ohio State University has been excellent. The friends that I have made (both faculty and students) will always be a part of my existence. Thanks for the good times

Chris's Bio:

Webmaster/Vice President for The Ohio State University chapter of the American Ecological Engineering Society

B.S. Civil Engineering specializing in Remote Sensing,

The Ohio State University, June 2000.

Current Position: Graduate Student in Civil Engineering focusing

in Ecological Engineering.

My Advisor is the infamous Dr. Timothy C. Granata

Research: My research focuses on techniques to monitor river restoration projects. Particularly, I am focusing on ways to monitor restoration success following a dam removal. I am using target fish and macroinvertebrate species to monitor the restoration success. I have created an ArcGIS © interface using Visual Basic programming that will produce habitat suitability maps for the Sandusky River, Ohio. The model uses suitability preference curves for depth, velocity, and substrate (particularly for greater redhorse and stoneflies).

Another part of my work focuses on development of a Remotely Sensed Qualitative Habitat Evaluation Index (RS-QHEI) using an aerial photograph (2000) and a satellite image (2005). Three metrics of the field based QHEI were used for the development of the new technique. The hope is to predict the metrics of the field based QHEI more quantitatively using digital imagery.

Here I am doing some GPS data collection for my research

Here I am getting ready to run our canoe mounted acoustic doppler profiler. Tim (my advisor) and I used this rig to acquire longitudinal profiles of the backwater reservoir

that the Saint John Dam created.

This is a photo of me and the YSI Sonde that Tim and I launched in the Sandusky River to calibrate our existing hydrodynamic model. Let me say that VW's are good for everything, including field work.

Most of my research has focused on river restoration following a dam removal. These pictures show the Saint John Dam on the Sandusky River, Ohio. This dam created a

backwater of about 6 miles. It was removed in November of 2003. The first picture shows the initial breach. The second is the dam at low water. The third is a shot when

the dam was completely removed. A riffle formed at the dam site which makes me lead to believe that this dam removal stuff does do some benefits to the river system.


This was my attempt at a living machine project. I conducted an experiment (along with the help of Andrew) to determine if tomato plants (Early Girl variety) could be grown in a small scale lab based living machine fed by dairy waste. The research was conducted in winter of 2004 during Dr. Jay Martin's FABE 652 class (Ecosystems for Waste Treatment). The picture on the right is the initial planting. The tomatoes were suspended on a floating barge with there roots in the water. The white cardboard grating was for initial support. The second picture is the plants after about 2 to 3 months of adding waste twice a week. The plants grew super fast and did produce tomatoes seen in the last two pictures. Although the tomatoes are not fully developed in the pictures, within a few weeks I had red, ripe, delicious tomatoes. Everyone including that fatty Danny G. tasted and enjoyed the fruits of the poo. I had hoped to reproduce this procedure in a larger system (Waterman Farm at OSU), but time constraints did not allow me to do this. Maybe this year.