Person with long dark blonde hair wearing a black sweater and gold scarf. Photographed outdoors, with green vegetation and buildings in the background.

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 and clean energy.

Critical infrastructure

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

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.

Poso creek at sunset.

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

A tropical forest with a mountain in the background.

Investigating ecosystem structure and functioning in individual plants, plant communities, and entire forests at field sites from Panama to Brazil to Australia.

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 will affect ecosystems.

Geothermal field in daylight.

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

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

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

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.

Scientists taking carbon soil measurements in a forest.

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

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.

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.

A wooden walkway over a marshy flat area with shallow water and visible vegetation. Set against a bright blue sky with clouds. Christina Castanha, a person wearing a light colored hat, green shirt, and brown pants, collecting soil samples outdoors for a deep-soil warming experiment. Sunset on a prairie. Charlie Koven conducting fieldwork outdoors. Birdseye view of waves crashing on the shore. Scientist looks over plants in the EcoPOD.