Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental & Earth Sciences Area (EESA) have led the development of a new approach for monitoring terrestrial ecosystems, and have used the system to discover new insights about how processes in different compartments of an Arctic Tundra ecosystem interact over space and time.
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As an ecologist working with the Environmental & Earth Science Area’s Watershed Scientific Focus Area (SFA), Heidi Steltzer and her research assistant, Chelsea Wilmer, spend a lot of time conducting fieldwork in the picturesque Colorado mountains. Now, as she’s studying snowmelt and its effects on plant growth in Crested Butte, Colorado, Steltzer is bringing the SFA’s science to a much wider audience.
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Jill Banfield's research team provides new clues about the roles of subsurface microbes in globally important cycles and adds new branches to the tree of life.
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Using the award-winning PhyloChip, a credit card-sized device that can detect the presence of more than 60,000 species of bacteria and archaea, a new method was found that was more sensitive than conventional methods at assessing health risks of microbially contaminated water.
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Berkeley Lab will lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) to quantify how perturbations to mountainous watershed—floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt—impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. Researchers will observe and model watershed response to perturbations over seasonal to decadal timeframes, and from genome to watershed scales. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of…
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At IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Boris Faybishenko (Earth & Environmental Sciences, LBNL) participated in a July 2015 workshop on preparation of an IAEA Technical Report on Remediation of Groundwater and Acid and Metalliferous Drainage (AMD) at Uranium Mining Sites. Boris, who is an IAEA Technical Expert, and colleagues from Australia, Canada, USA and Czech Republic, will…
Read MoreESD’s Jill Banfield led a team that recently discovered many new groups or phyla of bacteria. The more than 35 new phyla equal in number all the plant and animal phyla combined. ESD’s Kenneth Williams was also involved in the research.
Read MoreA multidisciplinary team of researchers led by ESD’s Haruko Wainwright developed an ecosystem functional zonation approach to characterize the spatial variability of properties that influence carbon cycling in the Arctic – in high resolution and over landscape scales.
Read MoreIn a paper published in Nature earlier in 2015, former ESD researchers Jenni Hultman and Janet Jansson, ESD affiliate Maude David, and others applied multiple molecular technologies (collectively referred to as “omics”) to characterize microbial activity in the Arctic permafrost. They sought to determine the composition of microbial communities within permafrost, specifically this community’s role in…
Read MoreJill Banfield shares her perspective on how the DOE Joint Genome Institute helps advance her research, addressing knowledge gaps related to the roles of subsurface microbial communities in biogeochemical cycling.
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