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

Custom instrumentation

Subsurface investigation

Critical infrastructure

Wildflowers in front of the East river watershed winding river. Poso creek at sunset. A tropical forest with a mountain in the background. Three scientists in the middle of a forest of tall trees and burned landscape. Geothermal field in daylight. Many piece of large scientific instrumentation in a large bay holding facility. A flux tower in a brown field with clouds above. Scientists taking carbon soil measurements in a forest. View of atmospheric measurement instruments in front of a Colorado mountain. Dark-haired scientist in a polo and jeans kneeling in a field with various instrumentation 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.

 Sunset on a prairie. Person with short dark hair and glasses wearing a white collared shirt against a gray photo backdrop.

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.

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.

 Christina Castanha, a person wearing a light colored hat, green shirt, and brown pants, collecting soil samples outdoors for a deep-soil warming experiment. A small brown wooden model of a house sits on cracked concrete Conceptual painting depicting celestial purple orbs of varying sizes connected with stretching strands. Charlie Koven conducting fieldwork outdoors. Birdseye view of waves crashing on the shore. Scientist looks over plants in the EcoPOD.