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.
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.
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 recent study led by Berkeley Lab climate scientists aims to inform the discussion around how protecting additional land to meet conservation goals may impact land use (such as agricultural) and land cover (such as grass, water, or vegetation). The research is among the first to explore how potential pathways to achieve these bold targets affect agricultural expansion, and its findings suggest that meeting the 30% protection targets could lead to substantial regional shifts in land use and in some cases still fail to protect the world’s most biodiverse hotspots.
Ecologist and environmental informatics researcher Joan Damerow is using interdisciplinary data to help accelerate environmental systems science. She’s working with the scientific community to build data management practices and tools needed to integrate and reuse datasets gathered by scientists around the world, to easily share findings and put that information to work.