Susan Hubbard (ESA, LBNL) “Imaging Watershed Behavior & Overview of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area”

ABSTRACT:

Quantifying how terrestrial systems respond to climate change and other perturbations is challenging due to the complexity of associated processes that occur from bedrock-to-canopy and from genome to watershed scales. This presentation will describe the development of several new approaches to help bridge these compartments and scales through integrating disparate geophysical, hydrological, geochemical and microbial datasets. A brief overview of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area will first be provided to motivate the technical presentation. The presentation will subsequently describe the use of new geophysical characterization approaches in an Arctic tundra ecosystem, where increasing temperatures are thawing the permafrost, potentially leading to significantly increased production of greenhouse gasses. The development and testing of new methods to quantify the structure and function of a mountainous watershed in the Upper Colorado River Basin, where droughts and early snowmelt may influence downgradient water availability and water quality, will then be presented. The recent advances are leading to insights about how these systems function and respond to perturbations – from local scales where native processes occur toward watershed scales that are relevant for managing natural resources.