We study how ecosystems and the services they provide to people are changing at regional levels. Our group consists of ecologists, remote sensing specialists, biogeochemists and land-surface modelers, working together scientifically to support conservation, management, and policy developmen

The Caldeira Lab conducts research to try to improve the science base needed to allow human civilization to develop while protecting our environmental endowment.

I am interested in how microbial life affects the chemistry and climate of our planet today and throughout time.  I study the activity of bacteria and archaea driving carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling in diverse modern ecosystems, with a focus on processes directly or indirectly involved in greenhouse gas cycling.  I am especially interested in exploring the activity and metabolic capabilities of uncultured bacteria and archaea on the single-cell level, and relating activity on the micron scale to chemical cycling on the global scale. I use a combination of techniques from molecular biology and isotope geochemistry, including stable isotope probing, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), Nanoscale Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (NanoSIMS), Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS), and DNA and RNA analysis.

My group specializes in high resolution studies of climatic and oceanic variability during modern times as well as over the past 50 to 12,000 years. Our most productive archives for this work include the skeletons of long-lived corals from the tropics and the deep sea, as well as sediments from lakes and marine environments. We use chemical, isotopic, and morphological measurements of these materials to investigate the timing and rates of change associated with past solar and C cycle excursions. Current field areas include the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, the Line Islands, Kenya, Easter Island, Chile, Patagonian Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, and Palau. We are also well into a multi-year effort to collect deep sea corals to better understand their ecology as well as their self-contained records of change in the deep sea. We do this work using deep diving research submersibles in the Gulf of Alaska and the central tropical and north Pacific.

The Field Lab focuses on basic ecological research from the ecosystem scale to the global scale. Emphases include climate-change impacts, ecosystem responses to multi-factor global changes, the terrestrial carbon cycle, biosphere/atmosphere interactions, and biogeochemical consequences of changes in species composition. We use experiments, models, and satellite data for a synthetic perspective.

Our research interests span a range of topics including the scientific basis for water resources management, hydroecology / ecohydrology, surface - groundwater interactions, groundwater allocation policy, fluid flow and solute transport processes, innovative simulation techniques, and cutting-edge technologies in hydrogeophysics and remote sensing in hydrology.

We study the interactions between food production, food security, and the environment using a range of modern tools. The work is motivated by questions such as: What investments are most effective at raising global crop yields, in order to increase food production without expansion of agricultural lands? Will yield gains be able to keep pace with global demand for crop products, given current levels of investment? And what direct or indirect effects will efforts to raise crop productivity have on other components of the Earth System, such as climate? Answering these requires an understanding of the complex factors that limit crop yields throughout the world, and the links between agriculture and the broader Earth System. Current work focuses on three main areas of research.

Our research interests focus on characterizing complexity and quantifying uncertainty in environmental systems with the goal of improving our understanding of these systems and our ability to forecast their variability. Our current research interests focus on atmospheric greenhouse gas emission and sequestration estimation, water quality monitoring and contaminant source identification, and use of remote sensing data for earth system characterization. The common theme of our research is the development and application of spatiotemporal statistical data fusion methods for optimizing the use of limited in situ and remote sensing environmental data. We are also interested in the environmental policy, economic and legal impact and applicability of environmental research.

Our group studies the physics of the ocean circulation. Specifically, we seek to understand the dynamics of highly energetic, time-variable flows such as ocean fronts, vortices, and eddies. Such flows efficiently exchange heat, salt, nutrients, and dissolved gases between the surface of the ocean and the ocean interior and hence play an important role in the Earth’s climate and the oceanic sequestration of carbon. We use theory, computer modeling, and field observations to characterize the fundamental physics of the ocean circulation with the goal of improving the oceanic component of computer models used to predict future climate change.