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Stroud Scientists at WorkA Critical Zone Observatory for the Christina River Basin
NSF has established six CZOs, ranging from alpine regions in the Rocky Mountains to the wet tropical forests of Puerto Rico, each of which represents a different geographic region with specific land forms, bedrock types, and climate. This network of observatories provides a national resource for scientists studying the fundamental geological, biological, and chemical processes that regulate life on Earth. Stroud Water Research Center scientists and their University of Delaware colleagues suggest that erosion by agriculture and urbanization constitute a major geological process, and the grant provides them an opportunity to study the impacts of those activities on carbon exchanges among land, water and the atmosphere — processes that are critical components of climate change models.
The Christina River Basin, which includes the White Clay, Red Clay and Brandywine creeks, is an ideal natural laboratory for this research. "The project provides an exciting opportunity for teams of scientists to look back at centuries of settlement, forest clearing and agriculture, as well as the more recent processes of urban and suburban growth, to understand the historical impacts of human activities on the carbon cycle," said Lou Kaplan, senior research scientist at the Stroud Water Research Center and one of the principal investigators on the study. "Our studies will span broad scales, ranging from the chemistry of individual molecules to the vastness of the entire Christina River Basin." STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGY WILL BENEFIT A BROADER COMMUNITY At the heart of this study will be new, state-of-the-art technology and a cyberinfrastructure that will enable scientists to automate data collection now done manually; the automation will massively increase the extent and frequency of collection. Scientists will move from bi-weekly collection followed by lab analysis to accessing real-time data every 15 minutes or more — while their colleagues thousands of miles away will have access to it in a searchable database via the internet. Said Aufdenkampe of the technology, "The increased frequency and accessibility of the data promises to catalyze new insights and collaboration, while providing a more accurate picture of the processes being studied." Additionally, the CZO will expand the number of collection sites to many more groundwater sites and streams and will increase the data types studied to include new chemistry of sediments and more. All of this research data will be collected from forested, agricultural and suburban landscapes in the watershed to help the research team better understand the relationship between specific landscape disturbances and carbon sequestration, and that information, in turn, will inform education programs that are anticipated in the fourth and fifth years of the study.
Links: For more information on the Christina River Basin CZO, go to: Read the University of Delaware’s CZO announcement at:
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With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), scientists from the Stroud Water Research Center and the University of Delaware will establish a Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) in the 895-square-mile Christina River Basin that spans southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware. The critical zone is that area which extends from the top of the tree canopy to the bedrock at the base of the soil column, where life as we know it takes place. The new Christina River Basin CZO is one of six observatories in the U.S., and the only one in a landscape inhabited for centuries by humans. The research aims to settle a scientific debate on whether human-induced erosion modifies greenhouse gas emissions from the landscape. 
Stroud scientist Anthony Aufdenkampe will coordinate the research that will trace the fates of carbon, water and sediments as they travel from uplands to the Delaware Bay. "Our overall goal will be to understand and quantify what happens to the carbon cycle when human earth-moving activities mix plant carbon and rock minerals, two components that are typically separated within soils," said Aufdenkampe.
"By bringing together scientists from multiple disciplines, we’ll be better poised to answer questions about these complex processes," adds Kyungsoo Yoo, assistant professor at University of Delaware, whose research centers on weathering and soil carbon cycles. 
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