East River, CO, USA (Courtesy of Jill Banfield)
The quality of water that leaves the watershed is impacted by soil microbial communities that will be studied here. The research will target regions along the East River, a tributary of the Colorado River, focusing on three subsystems: the river corridor and hillslopes and consider effects of time of year, depth below the surface and vegetation type. The study is part of a major Department of Energy project that is investigating how terrestrial systems respond to perturbations, such as droughts, floods and early snowmelt.
Proposer: Jill Banfield, UC Berkeley
Proposal: LBNL Watershed Function SFA: Biogeochemical dynamics from genome to watershed scales