Berkeley Lab

Three Collaborative Watershed Seed Projects Funded

To catalyze engagement of new investigators and collaborative projects/initiatives, the Watershed Function SFA has selected three 1-year, collaborative mini-projects for funding. The applicants were selected for award from a large number of excellent and highly competitive proposals. The selected awards include:

“Developing capabilities for integration of microbiological and geochemical data processing” (Romy Chakraborty). This mini-project aims to demonstrate the value of connecting data infrastructures of Watershed SFA, ESS DIVE, and KBase for developing a breakthrough new capability to easily process and enable visualization of environmental microbiome data in the context of macro scale environmental dynamics.

“Establishing a new modeling capability for the East River watershed to study forest responses to perturbations” (Lara Kueppers). The objective of this mini-project is to develop a process-based forest ecosystem model that contributes to robust predictions of Rocky Mountain watershed responses to perturbations.

“Integrated Ecosystem Sensing for Tracking the Hydrodynamics of the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Continuum and Impacts on Soil Respiration and Plant Growth” (Yuxin Wu). This project will utilize the unique capability built into the EcoSENSE SMART soils testbed for quantitative tracking of the moisture dynamics in a simulated hillslope system driven by both hydrological perturbations and plant/soil interactions, and the subsequent effects on ET and soil/plant respiration. Using a suite of sensors in a soil testbed, combined with direct sampling and characterization methods, the mini-project is expected to deliver comprehensive, dense and spatiotemporally correlated data sets to track system dynamics.