The Critical Zone Observatories Employee Directory

We are one of six nationally funded Critical Zone Observatories, established in 2007. Our research promotes the understanding of how a forested, first-order catchment of shale bedrock evolves over multiple time scales in a temperate climate. Nick Kaiser, summer REU student, collecting soil respiration data from the south swale transect within Shale... Hills, PA. With processes occurring on the order of minutes (meteorological) to millennia (geological), we investigate how water sculpts a shale bedrock landscape and what controls the hydrologic and elemental budgets of the catchment. We seek to quantify the rates and mechanisms of important hydrological, ecological and geochemical processes. Our research team spans three colleges within PSU: Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Agricultural Sciences.Read More