EAR-PF: Mapping Belowground Processes Using Remotely Measured Foliar Chemistry

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Dr. Katherine D. Chadwick has been granted an NSF EAR Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out research and education plans at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Building on recent developments of airborne-based measurements of the chemistry of leaves (foliar chemistry), Dr. Chadwick will develop the methodology to remotely map soil organic carbon and nutrient profiles. This methodology will be of interest to those that need to determine inventories of subsurface carbon and nutrient stocks for scientific or management questions. The datasets derived from this project could be used to test models of soil carbon stocks and turnover and help to develop methodology for large-scale land surface models. The education activities will focus on mentoring two undergraduate students in research projects related to the investigation. No geophysical, geochemical, or remote sensing approaches currently exist that can map below ground soil carbon or nutrient composition over large spatial scales, requiring most studies to rely on point sampling and intensive characterization methods combined with uncertain spatial extrapolations. The ability to remotely assess soil carbon and key nutrient stocks using above ground measures will allow for spatially explicit estimates of soil carbon inventories and their relationship to landscape position, lithology, soil moisture, aspect, and other remotely measurable parameters. In addition, building a link between remotely detectable characteristics of vegetation and subsurface properties will open a window into the spatial distribution of critical zone processes and how they interact over spatial scales currently not feasible to study.