From forests to wetlands and the subsurface to the exosphere, Earth is a collection of complex ecosystems and processes. We’ve pioneered approaches to explore these in the laboratory and in remote and extreme field environments to better understand ecological and climate systems.

Trevor Keenan, a brown-haired person wearing a collared shirt, smiles for a headshot outdoors.

Autonomous and remote sensing

Develop and deploy community observatories, nimble and networked sensing systems, and scale-adaptive tools to observe and simulate processes across space and time.

Custom instrumentation

Build, develop, and deploy customized Earth science instrumentation at the unique DOE Geosciences Measurement Facility.

Subsurface investigation

Develop tools for probing and monitoring Earth’s subsurface to examine potential for carbon storage, hydrogen, and geothermal energy.

Critical infrastructure

Understand and improve critical infrastructure resilience to leaks and natural hazards.

Watershed Scientific Focus Area

Wildflowers in front of the East river watershed winding river.

Developing tools to measure and predict how droughts, early snowmelt, and other disturbances affect water availability.

SUMMATION

Poso creek at sunset.

Developing tools and methods to identify high-emissions methane hotspots.

Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE-Tropics)

A tropical forest with a mountain in the background.

Advancing model predictions of tropical forest carbon cycle responses to various climate conditions.

Wildfire research

Three scientists in the middle of a forest of tall trees and burned landscape.

Incorporating data from burned areas within models to predict how wildfires affect ecosystems.

Geothermal Systems Program

Geothermal field in daylight.

Developing technologies to explore natural hydrothermal systems and enhanced geothermal systems.

Geosciences Measurement Facility

Many piece of large scientific instrumentation in a large bay holding facility.

Designing, building, testing, and deploying customized Earth and environmental science instrumentation.

AmeriFlux

A flux tower in a brown field with clouds above.

Supporting a network of principal investigator-managed sites measuring carbon, water, and energy fluxes across the Americas.

Belowground Biogeochemistry Scientific Focus Area

Scientists taking carbon soil measurements in a forest.

Developing predictive capacity of soil’s role in global models of ecosystem climate interactions.

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL)

View of atmospheric measurement instruments in front of a Colorado mountain.

An advanced atmospheric observatory exploring factors that affect how mountainous watersheds in the Rocky Mountains deliver water.

Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE)

Dark-haired scientist in a polo and jeans kneeling in a field with various instrumentation

A data repository that collects, stores, manages, and shares earth and environmental systems data created through research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

 Erica Woodburn, a dark-haired person, smiles outdoors.

Erica Siirila-Woodburn is a research scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division. A hydrogeologist by training, her research is focused in the fields of integrated groundwater-surface water hydrology, stochastic approaches and geostatistics, risk analysis, and numerical techniques.

 Person with short light brown hair wearing a blue jacket outdoors with green hills, trees, and mountains in the background. Below the hills is a town.

A hydroclimate research scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, Alan Rhoades uses climate models to assess the influence of climate change on mountainous water cycle processes, how those changes influence water resource management, and how the scientific community might better help water managers preemptively adapt to these changes.

 Person with short dark hair wearing glasses and a navy collared shirt.

Marcos Longo is a research scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division. His main focus is to understand the impacts of climate and land use change on tropical forest ecosystems, in addition to improving the representation of structural and functional diversity of tropical forests in terrestrial biosphere models.

 A view of an eddy covariance tower, capable of measuring the release of greenhouse gases, located in Alaska. Qing Zhu, a person with short dark hair wearing glasses and a dark blazer over a light pink collared shirt. Photographed against a gray backdrop.

A research team from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) analyzed wetland methane emissions data across the entire Boreal-Arctic region and found that these emissions have increased approximately nine percent since 2002.

Elaine Pegoraro is looking underfoot for answers to questions about the atmosphere above. The postdoctoral researcher is studying whether soil organisms in grasslands react to increasing temperatures by storing more carbon or releasing more carbon. This work will help us understand the planet’s future carbon balance.

Rising Sea Levels Could Lead to More Methane Emitted from Wetlands

A wooden walkway over a marshy flat area with shallow water and visible vegetation. Set against a bright blue sky with clouds.

Preserving Forests to Protect Deep Soil From Warming

Christina Castanha, a person wearing a light colored hat, green shirt, and brown pants, collecting soil samples outdoors for a deep-soil warming experiment.

Doubling Protected Lands for Biodiversity Could Require Tradeoffs With Other Land Uses, Study Finds

Sunset on a prairie.

Climate Science

Charlie Koven conducting fieldwork outdoors.

Clean and Affordable Water

Birdseye view of waves crashing on the shore.

Microbes to Ecosystems

Scientist looks over plants in the EcoPOD.