Senior Personnel

Senior Personnel

Name: Bales, Roger

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:
PI, mountain hydrology

Name: Conklin, Martha

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Co-PI surface-groundwater interaction

Name: Tague, Christina

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Co-PI modeling water and nutrient cycles

Name: Glaser, Steve

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

DUST wireless sensor network for the CZO

Name: Hopmans, Jan

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Soil Hydrology

Name: Riebe, Cliff

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Geomorphology

Name: Goulden, Mike

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Flux tower Co-PI, CZO support.

Name: Hart, Stephen

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Soil microbiology and ecology, biogeochemistry

Name: Berhe,AsmeretAsefaw

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Soil microbiology and ecology, biogeochemistry

Postdoctoral researchers

Name: Ray, Ram

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Modeling, Postdoctoral scholar

Name: Hartsough, Peter

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Soil hydrology, Postdoctoral scholar

Graduate Student

Name: Lucas, Ryan

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Water cycle and meadow research, PhD student

Name:Malazian, Armen

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Soil hydrology projects, PhD student

Name: Kerkez, Branko

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Formation and installation of wireless sensor network, PhD student

Name: Kirchner, Peter

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Water cycle, soil moisture, PhD student

Name: Hayes, Jorden

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Geomorphology, erosion, PhD student

Name: Son, Kyongho

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

PhD student modeling water and nutrient cycles, PhD student

Name: Welch, Steven

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Formation and installation of wireless sensor network, MS Student

Name: Kelly, Anne

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Evapotranspiration and water balance in forest

Name: Stacy, Erin

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Analysis of sediment and soil transport, part of carbon balance study, MS Student

Name: McCorkle, Emma

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Carbon cycling within study watersheds, MS Student

Name: Hahm, Jesse

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Geophysics

Name: Hayes, Jorden

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Geophysics

Name: Zhang, Ziran

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Wireless sensor network

Undergraduate students

Name: Roudneva,Ekaterina

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Undergraduate assistant on soil hydrology projects

Name: Marlowe, Nick

Worked for more than 160 Hours: No

Contribution to Project:

Undergraduate assistant on soil carbon cycling

Name: Jalpa,Laura

Worked for more than 160 Hours: No

Contribution to Project:

Undergraduate assistant on soil carbon cycling

Name: Newman, Alex

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Undergraduate assistant on soil carbon stabilization mechanisms

Name: Mecke,Emily

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Undergraduate Internon soil hydrology projects

Staff

Name: Meadows, Matt

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Research hydrologist in charge of continuing CZO field program

Name: Meng, Xiande

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Data management

Name: Stacy, Erin

Worked for more than 160 Hours: Yes

Contribution to Project:

Education and outreach coordinator for project

Research and Education Activities: (See PDF version submitted by PI at the end of the report)

See attached

Findings: (See PDF version submitted by PI at the end of the report)

See attached

Training and Development

The wireless sensor network remains an uncommon approach to gathering remote field data. The network installed at the Southern Sierra CZO consists of 57 wireless nodes, constituting one of the largest wireless networks for this purpose. Through the work on the wireless sensor network, training and experience continues for both investigators and graduate students.

Other training opportunities have been organized through open workshops. In December of 2012, UC Merced Professor QuinghuaGuo and several students organized the CZOLiDARAcquisition Initiative workshop at UC Berkeley. The workshop, which was timed to coincide with the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, catered to researchers from across the CZO network. Several presentations covered applications of LiDAR data in the CZO network, available LiDAR products, and emphasized collaboration possibilities for cross-site projects. In the area of geophysics,Riebe has actively worked as PI on a grant to organize and NSF-sponsored workshop on Drilling, Sampling, and Imaging the Depths of the Critical Zone. The workshop is planned for October 24–26, 2013, in Denver, CO.It will feature an international group of speakers.

Outreach Activities:

The educational mission of the Southern Sierra CZO is to put CZO research in a spatial and temporal context to improve the understanding between the Sierra Nevada snowpack and state water resources in California. The CZO accomplishes this mission through K-12 partnerships, undergraduate experiences, communicating with peers, stakeholder education, and media projects.

Scientific knowledge from the SSCZO has generated interest from stakeholders and resource managers across the state. Our sharing of scientific products with stakeholders includes frequent talks around the state, hosting of visits to our laboratories and the SSCZO site, briefings with water managers and policymakers, newspaper articles, op-ed pieces, radio interviews, television reports and web publications. A major focus has been on working with water leaders to define and develop a new water-information system for California that builds on advances in wireless-sensor networks developed at the SSCZO, plus parallel advances in cyberinfrastructure and in measurements by satellite and aircraft. A second area has been to bring climate-change research into the policy debate, which in recent years has been focused on infrastructure investments and water rights. Further information on our outreach activities is detailed for each audience below.

Researchers. Outreach efforts to researchers included multiple conference sessions as well as the workshops on LiDAR and the Depths of the Critical Zone. In May 2013, Riebe was the lead organizer of a session at the Cordilleran Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America. It was titled: “Critical Zone: Where Rock Meets Water and Life at Earth’s Surface.” Riebe also helped organize a session entitled “The Deep Critical Zone and the Inception of Surface Processes” at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Fall Meeting in December 2012. Southern Sierra CZO researchers presented invited lectures in varied venues. At the Fall Meeting, SSCZO presented over 20 talks and posters during the meeting, held this past December in San Francisco, CA. Data were presented by numerous PIs, graduate students, and research staff. The national CZO program was an exhibitor throughout the duration of the conference, providing information on all CZO sites. At another venue, Riebe presented a invited lecture entitled “Looking Deep, Beyond the Average, and Into the Future of Surface Processes Research” at the EarthCube Domain End-User Workshop: Engaging the Critical Zone community to bridge long tail science with big data at the University of Delaware, on January 22, 2013. Riebe also serves on an advisory committee for the EarthCubed effort.

The Southern Sierra CZO has been employing internet tools as part of its outreach program. In 2013, SSCZO established a presence on Twitter and Facebook, and SSCZO researchers are active contributors to the new blog started by Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced. As part of the Forest Service Webinar Series on Landscape Science, Pacific Southwest station researcher and long-time collaborator Carolyn Hunsaker hosted the March, 2013, webinar. The webinar, entitled "Watershed-scale experimental design & pre-treatment N-flux results: Kings River Experimental Watersheds, Sierra Nevada, CA", covered experimental design of the KREW research project. The Southern Sierra CZO is co-located with the lower elevation KREW site. In April 2013, Riebe and students presented a webinar entitled “Nutrient Deserts of the Sierra Nevada and Their Effects on Life, Soils, and Topography”. This was offered as part of a series of webinars designed to engage CZO scientists from across disciplines.

Public Education & outreach. We regularly (at least monthly) give talks across theregion, to stakeholders with an interest in the Sierra Nevada and its recourses. Weattend other planning meetings related to resource management, where CZO knowledgemay be applied. A public tour to the Providence CZO site was organized on August 9th. This tour covered the flux tower, the wireless sensor network, critical zone Tree-1, as well as our stream discharge gauging stations. Another focus was on the forestry treatments (mechanical thinning) that began in the summer of 2012. As part of a larger group at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, Southern Sierra CZO researchers and staff are contributing to a blog where the public can learn more about our research (snriblog.ucmerced.edu). The blog complements the streams of information on Facebook and Twitter, providing a more in-depth review of research issues, current questions, and researcher profiles.

Stakeholders & Resource Managers. Presentations are made to local organizations, and resource managers on nearly a monthly basis. Audiences have included nonprofit conservancies and water managers at the May Carpe Diem conference to the California Department of Food and Agriculture Consortium on Climate Change Adaptation in January. During our public tour, we hosted several congressional and state staffers, as well as forest and resource managers.

In cooperation with the US Forest Service Sierra National Forest, the Dinkey Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project is an ongoing effort to collaborate on Forest Service projects as part of the Forest Landscape Restoration Act. DinkeyCreek is located next to the CZO; Matt Meadows is a member of the group who represents CZO interests in land management projects. In the summer of 2013, Meadows officially transferred his position as CZO representative to Erin Stacy.

K-12 Education and outreach. We continue to build our partnership with local schools and organizations. Colleagues and staff presented twice in the Spring to NatureBridge-Yosemite (NB-Y) instructors-in-service program. The focus is on training instructors of the Yosemite Institute (YI) in critical zone processes, with a particular focus on mountain hydrology.We will focus on activities that stress the mountain water cycle, the role of the Sierra Nevada snowpacks to CA water supply and their vulnerability of the snow to climatechange.Armed with recent research results, these NB-Y instructors in turn facilitate outdoor field experiences for thousands of students in Yosemite National Park. Additional presentations are planned this fall, and we plan to collaborate with their Yosemite-area school program on their special topic this year: Geology and Watersheds. Other K-12 partnerships include presenting each year at Southern California Edison's Science Days and the American Association of University Girls Science Camp. SSCZO staff also presented at the Auberry Conservation Days. Combined, these presentations reached more than 500 grade school students. At these events CZO colleaguesfacilitate hands on activities for students that focus on how SierraNevada hydrology impacts California's water resources. Our K-12 partnership with the Center for Advanced Research andTechnology (CART) in Clovis, CA, continued, with CZO staff mentoring teams of CART students to conduct a comprehensive snow survey research project.

University education. Since 2007, CZO colleagues have been providing opportunities for undergraduate students. Undergraduates from UCM and partnering universities have worked as field and lab technicians. The CZO summer undergraduate research intern program has given students the chance to apply their knowledge of scientific concepts. In addition to research interns, the CZO has developed field methods courses for undergraduates at UCM and UCD, which were both held in the past year. A major component of these courses is visiting the CZO to learn about research and to collect data for use in class. Since the snow melted so early in the spring of 2013, activities focused on soil moisture measurements, meteorological station construction, and streambank measurements.

We plan to develop at least three university earth science “casestudies” using data and observations obtained from the CZO. One module will combinea basic energy balance with state of the art technology, Raman-backscatter distributedtemperature sensing, in a montane stream. Concepts to be stressed include the spatialheterogeneity of the stream as well as the role of obtaining system “snapshots” in time.These case studies will provide teaching notes for educators and will be posted on theCZO website; we will also post them on websites provided by professionalorganizations. These case studies will seek to provide earth science educators andstudents with current, peer-reviewed material.

Collaborations and cross-CZO work(ask other investigators for similar documentation, or move to another section?)

In FY 2012, Riebe’s ongoing collaborations with Leonard Sklar (San Francisco State) and Darryl Granger (Purdue University) expanded in separate but related projects to include work on weathering and erosion at the Southern Sierra CZO. The work with Granger (which will develop cosmogenic Be-10 in magnetite as a new tool in erosion and weathering studies) has been funding by NSF and includes a cross-CZO field component at the Luquillo CZO. In a separate, cross-CZO initiative, Riebe has recently been funded with Jon Chorover (U. Arizona; Sta. Catalina-Jemez CZO PI) to organize an NSF-workshop on drilling, sampling and geophysical imaging of the deep critical zone. Riebe is also continuing to collaborate with Sue Brantley (Penn State) as guest editor of a special issue on the deep critical zone for Earth Surface Processes and Landforms (Riebe and Brantley, in prep). Meanwhile collaborations have continued with Scott Miller (Associate Professor, Terrain Analysis, U. Wyoming), Steve Holbrook (Professor, Geophysics, U. Wyoming), and Anthony Dosseto (Lecturer, Geochemistry, U. Wollongong). The collaboration with Holbrook has recently evolved into a fully funded center for environmental geophysics at the University of Wyoming. The collaboration with Holbrook on geophysics has broadly included Hopmans (SSCZO co-PI on vadose zone) and his student and post-doc as well as Riebe (erosion and weathering), thus instilling new interdisciplinary cohesion in the SSCZO team (Holbrook et al., in revision). Graduate students working on erosion and weathering at the CZO include Claire Lukens (PhD candidate, U. Wyoming), Jorden Hayes (PhD candidate with Holbrook, U. Wyoming), Jesse Hahm (MS student, U. Wyoming), and Heather Rogers (PhD student, U. Wyoming). Funding supported part-time work, both in the field and in the lab, for 3 undergraduate students throughout the fiscal year.

See attached document for Bibliography

Other Specific Products

Product Type:

Instruments or equipment developed

Product Description:

Still need to include? Do we have updated patent information?System and method for measuring water fluxes and partitioning across a landscape. Disclosure & patent application filed; pending. Will be included on UC Merced's report to federal government in June 2011.

Sharing Information:

Scalable water-balance instrument cluster.

Contributions

Contributions within Discipline:

The CZO provides a multi-disciplinary platform for research. Most of the CZO data are available to the community, and other data to CZOcooperators who agree to data-sharing protocols.

Contributions to Other Disciplines:

The CZO fosters multi-disciplinary research. The site is also a candidate for a NEON investment(updates from Matt or Steve), which could significantly enhance some ofour CZO activities.

Contributions to Human Resource Development:

Several graduate students, undergraduates and recent Ph.D. graduatesare involved with the CZO, and are preparing themselves for independent measurement and data analysis work in field hydrology, biogeochemistry, geophysics, andmodeling.

Contributions to Resources for Research and Education:

The CZO is a research platform, i.e. infrastructure for multidisciplinary research. CZO collaborations have created numerous education resources for K-12 students, as well as portals for the public to access information about findings and data. Our CZO has developed 2 successful undergraduate courses in field methods and is contributing to an intensive critical zone course through an InTeGrate-funded cross-CZO team.

Contributions Beyond Science and Engineering:

The high profile of our CZO helps communicate water and other critical zone issues to the public, and helps educate agencies about the need tomodernize measurement and decision-making infrastructure.