Rate My Professor Timothy Covino

Dr. Timothy Covino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University, specializing in watershed science. He serves as Program Director for the online graduate program in Quantitative Methods in Environmental Sciences and as Advisor for the Environmental Analytical Lab focusing on watershed hydrology. Covino earned his B.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2000, M.S. from Montana State University in 2005, and Ph.D. from Montana State University in 2012. Following his Ph.D., he received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2012 to 2014. He leads the Watershed Analysis Research Group, now based at Montana State University since fall 2022, where his team studies hydrologic and biogeochemical implications of land use and land cover change in forested and agricultural systems.

Covino's academic interests center on watershed hydrology and biogeochemistry, including hydrologic connectivity as a determinant of biogeochemical fluxes, stream-groundwater interactions, nutrient spiraling and uptake kinetics, beaver-mediated connectivity, hyporheic processes, and post-disturbance ecohydrology such as climate-wildfire feedbacks in Arctic-boreal zones. As Principal Investigator on a NASA EPSCoR Rapid Response project from 2023 to 2026, he evaluates how climate organizes wildfire patterns and post-fire trajectories of permafrost thaw, vegetation, and hydrology in the ABoVE domain. His influential publications include "Connectivity as an emergent property of geomorphic systems" (2019, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms), "Hydrologic connectivity as a framework for understanding biogeochemical flux through watersheds and along fluvial networks" (2017, Geomorphology), "Tracer Additions for Spiraling Curve Characterization (TASCC)" (2010, Limnology and Oceanography: Methods), "Stream gains and losses across a mountain-to-valley transition" (2007, Water Resources Research), "Beaver-mediated lateral hydrologic connectivity, fluvial carbon and nutrient flux, and aquatic ecosystem metabolism" (2017, Water Resources Research), and "Vulnerable waters are essential to watershed resilience" (2023, Ecosystems). Additional contributions encompass NSF-funded projects like EAR #1642368 on hyporheic zones and RAPID #2028778 for online hydrology education resources, a book chapter in Treatise on Geomorphology (2021), and the forthcoming book "From Forests to Faucets" (2025).