DR. VICTOR M. PONCE

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Dr. Victor Miguel Ponce has been a professor of civil engineering at San Diego State University for the past 36 years.

Dr. Ponce is an expert in water resources engineering and an accomplished teacher-scholar. He is the author of several textbooks, some of them published online.

His VISUALAB is a world-class facility for the advancement of water resources engineering, featuring more than 200 online calculators to solve a variety of engineeering problems.

For the past ten years, Dr. Victor M. Ponce has researched the issue of groundwater sustainability in San Diego County.

He is currently conducting a two-year field study in the community of Tierra del Sol, adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border, in Boulevard, East San Diego County.

Location of Boulevard within San Diego County

The study is entitled " Ecohydrology of red shank."

The objective is to show that an existing linear oasis of [the] red shank [species] (Adenostoma sparsifolium), a type of chaparral, is wholly supported by groundwater exfiltration.

The red shank vegetative lineament in Tierra del Sol

Stand of red shank in Tierra del Sol (Adenostoma sparsifolium)

For this purpose, a vegetative lineament has been identified in the field. Measurements of soil moisture are carried out every fortnight in two locations: (1) a target location, on the lineament, and (2) a control location, outside of it.

The objetive is to show that the moisture content in the target location is much greater than that of the control, proving that the lineament is being steadily supplied with moisture originating in groundwater exfiltration.

Excessive pumping of groundwater for proposed renewable energy development [solar and wind] may reduce exfiltration [springs] and endanger the livelihood of the linear oasis.

Since 2004, that is, for the past 12 years, Prof. Ponce's VISUALAB has been at the forefront in the development of online calculators for water resources applications. To this date, more than 200 calculators have been developed.

The gamut of calculators, available free to the world, ranges from the calculation of normal depth in an open channel, about 300 products, to as complex as the calculation of the dissolved oxygen sag curve in a natural stream, about 30 million products.

For the past seven years, Dr. Ponce's VISUALAB has been developing online videos for teaching and research applications. To this date, more than 250 videos have been produced.

Examples are:

The Tragedy of the Commons

Who owns the groundwater?

The 800-mm isohyet

Clips of one or more of these videos may be incorporated into the final video.