Engineering topics

Pennington, Stephanie C. (ORCID:0000000326851092)

Publications and source records attributed to Pennington, Stephanie C. (ORCID:0000000326851092).

3 records

DOE OSTI2023

Biogeochemistry of upland to wetland soils, sediments, and surface waters across Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes coastal interfaces

Transferable and mechanistic understanding of cross-scale interactions is necessary to predict how coastal systems respond to global change. Cohesive datasets across geographically distributed sites can be used to examine how transferable a mechanistic understanding of coastal ecosystem control points is. To address the above research objectives, data were collected by the EXploration of Coastal Hydrobiogeochemistry Across a Network of Gradients and Experiments (EXCHANGE) Consortium – a regionally distributed network of researchers that collaborated on experimental design, methodology, collection, analysis, and publication. The EXCHANGE Consortium collected samples from 52 coastal terrestrial-aquatic interfaces (TAIs) during Fall of 2021. At each TAI, samples collected include soils from across a transverse elevation gradient (i.e., coastal upland forest, transitional forest, and wetland soils), surface waters, and nearshore sediments across research sites in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions (Chesapeake and Delaware Bays) of the continental USA. The first campaign measures surface water quality parameters, bulk geochemical parameters on water, soil, and sediment samples, and physicochemical parameters of sediment and soil.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2022

Enabling FAIR data in Earth and environmental science with community-centric (meta)data reporting formats

Abstract Research can be more transparent and collaborative by using Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to publish Earth and environmental science data. Reporting formats—instructions, templates, and tools for consistently formatting data within a discipline—can help make data more accessible and reusable. However, the immense diversity of data types across Earth science disciplines makes development and adoption challenging. Here, we describe 11 community reporting formats for a diverse set of Earth science (meta)data including cross-domain metadata (dataset metadata, location metadata, sample metadata), file-formatting guidelines (file-level metadata, CSV files, terrestrial model data archiving), and domain-specific reporting formats for some biological, geochemical, and hydrological data (amplicon abundance tables, leaf-level gas exchange, soil respiration, water and sediment chemistry, sensor-based hydrologic measurements). More broadly, we provide guidelines that communities can use to create new (meta)data formats that integrate with their scientific workflows. Such reporting formats have the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and predictions by making it easier for data contributors to provide (meta)data that are more interoperable and reusable.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

Localized basal area affects soil respiration temperature sensitivity in a coastal deciduous forest

Abstract. Soil respiration (Rs), the flow of CO2 from the soil surface to the atmosphere, is one of the largest carbon fluxes in the terrestrial biosphere. The spatial variability of Rs is both large and poorly understood, limiting our ability to robustly scale it in space. One factor in Rs spatial variability is the autotrophic contribution from plant roots, but it is uncertain how the presence of plants affects the magnitude and temperature sensitivity of Rs. This study used 1 year of Rs measurements to examine the effect of localized basal area on Rs in the growing and dormant seasons, as well as during moisture-limited times, in a temperate, coastal, deciduous forest in eastern Maryland, USA. In a linear mixed-effects model, tree basal area within a 5 m radius (BA5) exerted a significant positive effect on the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration. Soil moisture was the dominant control on Rs during the dry portions of the year, while soil moisture, temperature, and BA5 all exerted significant effects on Rs in wetter periods. Our results suggest that autotrophic respiration is more sensitive to temperature than heterotrophic respiration at these sites, although we did not measure these source fluxes directly, and that soil respiration is highly moisture sensitive, even in a record-rainfall year. The Rs flux magnitudes (0.46–15.0 µmol m-2 s-1) and variability (coefficient of variability 10 %–23 % across plots) observed in this study were comparable to values observed in similar forests. Six Rs observations would be required in order to estimate the mean across all study sites to within 50 %, and 518 would be required in order to estimate it to within 5 %, with 95 % confidence. A better understanding of the spatial interactions between plants and microbes, as well as the strength and speed of above- and belowground coupling, is necessary to link these processes with large-scale soil-to-atmosphere C fluxes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗